The following version of this poem was used to create this study guide: Williams, William Carlos. “Spring and All [By the Road to the Contagious Hospital],” poets.org, https://poets.org/poem/spring-and-all-road-contagious-hospital.

Note that all parenthetical citations refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Born in 1883, William Carlos Williams was an American poet and writer in addition to his day job as a physician in pediatrics and general medicine in association with Passaic General Hospital (now called St. Mary’s General Hospital). His upbringing was culturally pluralistic – he was raised in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States by an English father who grew up in the Dominican Republic and a French mother from Puerto Rico. Williams’s first language was Spanish and his life was shaped by Caribbean customs while his literary works were all written in English.

In his poetic career, Williams was originally associated with the imagism branch of modernist literature through his friendships with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). However, his poetic views soon diverged from theirs though he remains associated with the modernist movement in arts and culture. Williams’s work also contrasts the modernist poetry of his famous contemporary T.S. Eliot. While Eliot’s work was highly intellectual in style and filled with foreign languages and Classical and European literary allusions, Williams was much less highbrow in his approach, preferring to use colloquial American English.

Spring and All is the title of one of Williams’s famous poetry collections, first published in 1923. However, the first poem of the collection, Poem I, is also known as “Spring and All” and shares the title of the entire poetry collection. In both the poem and the entire collection more broadly, Williams is interested in the powers of the human imagination. While the imagists with whom Williams was formerly affiliated were interested in describing the world as it appeared, Williams is concerned in “Spring and All” with how poetry recreates the world through the renewal of language.