Books by William Carlos Williams

Spring and All (1923) is a book of poems by William Carlos Williams. Predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his works, often comprised of a seamless blend of both forms of writing. In Spring and All, the closest thing to a manifesto he wrote, Williams addresses the nature of his modern poetics which not only pursues a particularly American idiom, but attempts to capture the relationship between language and the world it describes. Part essay, part poem, Spring and All is a landmark of American literature from a poet whose daring search for the outer limits of life both redefined and expanded the meaning of language itself. ¿There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here.¿ In Spring and All, Williams identifies the incomprehensible nature of consciousness as the single most important subject of poetry. Accused of being ¿heartless¿ and ¿cruel,¿ of producing ¿positively repellant¿ works of art in order to ¿make fun of humanity,¿ Williams doesn¿t so much defend himself as dig in his heels. His poetry is addressed ¿[t]o the imagination¿ itself; it seeks to break down the ¿the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment.¿ When he states that ¿so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow,¿ he refers to the need to understand the nature of language, which keeps us in touch with the world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Carlos Williams¿ Spring and All is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Great American Novel (1923) is an experimental novel by William Carlos Williams. Although he is predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his career. In the defining decade of Modernism, Williams sought to try his hand at the so-called "Great American Novel," a concept fueling impassioned debate in academic and artistic circles nationwide. Far from conventional, Williams' novel is a metafictional foray into matters more postmodern than modern, a commentary masquerading as narrative and a satire of the all-American overreliance on cliché in form and content. "If there is progress then there is a novel. Without progress there is nothing. Everything exists from the beginning. I existed in the beginning. I was a slobbering infant. Today I saw nameless grasses-I tapped the earth with my knuckle. It sounded hollow. It was dry as rubber. Eons of drought. No rain for fifteen days. No rain. It has never rained. It will never rain." Williams' novel begins with the word and a birth. Language describes the experience of awakening to experience, of coming into consciousness as a living being in a living world. Using words from everyday speech, he builds a novel out of observations, a book that remains conscious of itself throughout. Like the child whose first experience with the written word often comes from names and slogans stretched over trucks and billboards, the reader eventually comes to accept their new reality, a world where people love and succeed and fail, where history and art intercede to make meaning where they can. The Great American Novel showcases Williams' experimental form, stretching the meaning of "novel" to its outermost limit. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Carlos Williams' The Great American Novel is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

A collection of poems imitating the styles of the Romantics and the Victorians.

Gathered here are the gems of William Carlos Williams's astonishing achievements in poetry. Dramatic, energetic, beautiful, and true, this slim selection will delight any reader-The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems is a book to be treasured.

These collected letters of two key figures from the Modernist period span a period of 42 years. The animated exchange between a canonical poet and the leading American rhetorical critic of the 20th century offers a complete vision of their outlooks and contributions to the Modernist scene.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) produced a startling number of translations of both Spanish and Latin American poetry starting during WWI and continuing through the late fifties. Williams grew up in a Spanish-speaking home and sometimes described himself as half-Spanish. His mother was Puerto Rican and his father spoke Spanish fluently. "Spanish is not, in the sense to which I refer, a literary language," Williams wrote in his Autobiography. "It has a place of its own, an independent place very sympathetic to the New World."Williams approached translation as a way not only to present the work of unknown Spanish poets, but also to extend the range and capacity of American poetry, to use language "with unlimited freshness." Included in this bilingual edition are beautifully rendered translations of poets well-known - Neruda, Paz, and Parra - and lesser-known: Rafael Are¿valo Marti¿nez (from Guatemala), Rafael Belträn Logron~o (from Spain), and Eunice Odio (from Costa Rica).

William Carlos Williams's medical practice and his literary career formed an undivided life. For forty years he was a busy doctor in the town of Rutherford, New Jersey, and yet he was able to write more than thirty books. One of the finest chapters in the Autobiography tells how each of his two roles stimulated and supported the other.

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.

The miscellany of essays, notes, fragments, and jottings to which William Carlos Williams gave the title The Embodiment of Knowledge was found in manuscript after his death in the archive of his papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Written in 1928-30, and dedicated to his sons, it was intended as a concrete demonstration of the organic nature of education, to show that knowledge is an ongoing process by which we create our selves from day to day. And to underscore the fact that so many of his own books were extended works of self-exploration, Dr. Williams wrote on the cover of his manuscript: "to be printed as it is, faults and all."

Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express "the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward."The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.

This volume chronicles the correspondence between William Carlos Williams, a Pullitzer Prize-winning American poet, and his publisher, James Laughlin, the founder of "New Directions".