William Carlos Williams 
Spring and All 

Spring and All is a hybrid work consisting of alternating sections of prose and free verse. It might best be understood as a manifesto of the imagination. The prose passages are a dramatic, energetic and often cryptic series of statements about the ways in which language can be renewed in such a way that it does not describe the world but recreates it. These passages are interspersed with poems that demonstrate this recreation in both their form and content. The two most famous sections of Spring and All are poems I and XXII. The former, which opens ‘By the road to the contagious hospital’, is commonly known by the title ‘Spring and All’, and the latter is generally known as ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’.