ABSTRACT
Spring and All As Webster Schott points out, William Carlos Williams' Spring and All "was printed in Dijon and first published in Paris in 1923 (around 300 copies) by Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Co." (see Williams, 1970). Unfortunately, however, Spring and All remained unavailable as a complete book for many years. Because it was published as a limited edition and because, as Paul Mariani (1981) points out, "most of the copies that were sent to America were simply confiscated by American customs officials[,] ... Spring and All all but disappeared as a cohesive text until its republication nearly ten years after Williams' death." Despite this fact, the appearance of the book represented an important personal success for Williams, for until McAlmon generously published Spring and All at his own expense, Williams had only been able to publish the poems from the book, without the prose. The publication of Spring and All marked a new stage in the development of his style, but the work also continued the improvisatory method of Kora in Hell (1920). Prose passages alternate with poetry throughout Spring and All, and the entire book reflects Williams' experimentation in both forms as well as his passionate questioning of the division between them. Spring and All is not only a collection of important lyrics but also Williams' personal manifesto of the Modernist imagination. The prose sections of the book, which sometimes break off in the middle of a sentence, represent the poet's ruminations on imagination, reality, and the role of art, and the poems often serve as examples of his unfolding "argument." In the course of the book, Williams works out his view that the imagination remakes rather than reflects reality.
