ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the New Jersey Meadowlands inform William Carlos Williams’s writing, especially in his avant-garde collection Spring and All. Considering the poet’s proximity to and engagement with the nearby greenery, this chapter explores an ecological mode of thinking with the notions of atmosphere and ambience, which often operate obliquely and evoke a range of features including climate, pollution, and background as background. This is done to show how the Meadowlands function as a formative pressure that shapes not only Williams’s poetics, but also his conceptions of local contact and the imagination. Turning to poems like “Spring and All,” “Flight to the City,” “The Black Winds,” and “To Elsie,” this chapter historicizes the aesthetics of Spring and All in a way that reveals how the Meadowlands make their mark on Williams’s thematic concerns and textual materiality, which, in turn, puts one in contact with the world through the imagination.
