Spring and All (New Directions Pearls)

A beautiful facsimile of the 1923 original edition which is considered "one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century". (The New York Times)

Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination ― a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that coalesce in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language re-creates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams’s best-known poetry, including Section I, which opens, “By the road to the contagious hospital,” and Section XXII, where Williams penned his most famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Now, almost 90 years since its first publiction, New Directions publishes this facsimile of the original 1923 Contact Press edition, featuring a new introduction by C. D. Wright.

Besides being a practicing physician, William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) was a poet, short-story writer, novelist, translator, playwright, and essayist whose contribution to the development of modern American poetry grew out of his commitment to recording the "local" experience of Rutherford, New Jersey, and its environs.

C. D. Wright’s most recent poetry collection Rising, Falling, Hovering won the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. She is currently the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University.