William Carlos Williams 
Spring and All 

Heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land, " the poems of Spring and All express the author's beliefs about the role and form of art in a modern context. William Carlos Williams offers an intensely stylized set of exercises in reduction that capture, in his words, "the immediacy of experiences." Sections of vivid, sensuous prose — described by the poet as "a mixture of philosophy and nonsense"—alternate with straightforward free verse that explores the creative uses of imagination and the power of language. "Spring and All, " the title work of this 1923 collection, represents Williams's first major achievement as a poet, and was praised by The New York Times as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. This groundbreaking compilation also features some of the poet's best-known verse, including the modernist masterpieces: "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "To Elsie."