Less explicitly, he also talks about these features emerging in the arts at the time. Markos states this also,
“the prose context of the poem in ‘Spring and all’… strongly suggests that Williams had in mind the birth of new forms of poetry as well as plant life… The same force operating biologically in nature functions at a higher level in human consciousness to create art.”
Markos is not alone in noting this connection. Gelpi also makes reference to Williams as a modern artist,
“This poem is a fine example of Williams’ verbal cubist realism”, Cubism, in painting, was adopted and developed by artists such as Pablo Picasso at the same time as Williams’ poetry.
Indeed, other critics have recognised his relation to the modern art period (roughly 1910-40) and further have associated him with the upheaval apparent with painters of that generation. M.L. Rosenthal observed,
“Williams had far more of a painter’s eye than do most poets; see, for instance, his ‘Pictures from Brueghel” (1962)… It is clear that he felt a compelling convergence of visual and aural patterns as he wrote.” Williams Not only wrote in a distinctive style relating to painting, but also in interviews described his poems and approach to poetry using similar metaphors,
“It’s what you put on the canvas – and how you put it on – that makes the picture… it’s [poems] made of words… pigments, put on, here, there, made, actually…”
This use of imagery, without overstatement and overtly forcing the reader to visualise the scene is evident in ‘Spring and all’. The first sections of the poem mention many colours within the scene – “blue mottled clouds,” “muddy fields”, “brown with dried leaves”, “reddish, purplish”. Once the readers are fed a palette of colours, they can but visualise them. Consequently we also visualise what the colours describe literally and their connotations. The ‘reddish, purplish’ colours have a brutal feel to them, not only in Williams’ representation of spring but in the personification I mentioned previously – being colours we might use to describe bruises or bloody wounds.
Similarly to drawing your eye into a painting and being led through it, so too are you led through ‘Spring and all’ by the words. The ‘cold wind’ is the motion leading the reader through the poem. “By the road” introduces a path to follow. “Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields” explains there is more to come and the poem will continue moving.
The attention to the world of painting is not the only reason why ‘Spring and all’ represents a particularly modernistic treatment of the subject, however. Williams takes a contemporary and ‘modernistic’ stance on the subject of spring. The modernists threw out the romantic conventions of their predecessors and took a more literal and stark approach, seeking to relay what was there, rather than embellish it. This is seen not only in Williams’ poetry. His peers assumed a similar viewpoint. An obvious example is T.S. Eliot’s statement in “The Burial of the Dead”, a section from “The Waste Land” that,
“April is the cruellest month,” overtly contradicting literary predecessor Geoffrey Chaucer, responding to his somewhat romantic portrayal of spring in ‘The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales’. Although developing very different styles, Eliot and Williams created similar ideas about spring. Again, using a different style and voice, Wallace Stevens adopted similar themes of discovery and identification in, “Not ides about things but the thing itself” of the same era, which considers spring’s arrival and it’s impact on living things. “That scrawny cry” notes the starting points from which spring breeds and the new lifecycle begins which, as a poetic subject, had not been discussed greatly, before this era.
Where Stevens’ clues of new life are more identifiable as tangibles, Williams’ clues are more often given through his term of phrase rather than subject matter. His words have their own energy and movement. “Surge” near “clouds” gives movement to an otherwise stationary “standing” backdrop to Williams’ revelations about spring. These give movement to more than the imagery and theme. The ‘surging’ ‘winds’ of change, that flow throughout the poem give energy and movement to the changes in style and conventions in the art form itself.
This leads me to discuss the informality of Williams’ style and characteristics, which ‘Spring and all’ displays. Of this particular style Williams was constantly refining, he said, “I began to begin lines with lower-case letters. I thought it pretentious to begin every line with a capital letter… When I came to the end of a rhythmic unit (not necessarily a sentence) I ended the line… The rhythmic unit usually came to me in a lyrical outburst. I wanted it to look that way on the page… The rhythmic pace was the pace of speech, an excited pace because I was excited when I wrote. I was discovering... The lines were short, not studied…”
A.W. Longman described Williams’ approach as him being “influenced by the imagist emphasis of the period – that stressed clarity, compression and precision, with direct treatment of the subject, and rhythms that were musical, not mechanical.” All of these features, and those Williams recognised himself are present in ‘Spring and all’.
Precise description of a truly plausible scene –
“patches of standing water”, “twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees”
illustrates his direct treatment of the subject and the unromantic, initially clinical treatment of spring – typical of the modernists, questioning traditional conventions.
Also present, is the clarity and ‘truth’ – its possibility of being real, without the images being over simplified,
“It quickens: clarity, outline of a leaf.” Clear rhythmic pattern and structure is also evident. The idea of the words and lines grouped by how they sound together, rather than how they look printed is clearly evident in ‘Spring and all’, in its seven unequal sections. It has a rhythmic, yet unregulated line structure and no rhyme scheme. Williams himself discussed how unnecessary a rhyme scheme was,
“With [Walt] Whitman, I decided rhyme belonged to another age; it didn’t matter; it was not important at all.”
‘Spring and all’ is characteristic of Williams’ style, approach and theme in its informal discussion and personification of spring. Furthermore, the parallels Williams has drawn between the new growth in the arts and in spring, give it Williams’ personal implicit voice and display his ability to use tangibles to describe intangibles. It is a poem describing on one level something visible itself, i.e. spring, and on another level something visible through its products i.e. the changes occurring in the arts, of which ‘spring and all’ is an example.
