Chapter 5 Modernism (2)

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Chapter 5 Modernism (2)

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Title: Chapter 5 Modernism (2)

1
Chapter 5 Modernism (2)

T. S. Eliot
Stevenson
Williams

2
Assignments

Define the term modernism
List the thematic characteristics modernism
Tell T. S. Eliots artistic features
What are the symbols in W. C. Williams Spring
and All
List the themes of W. C. Williams Spring and All
and find lines from the poem to support the
themes each
Answer the first two question on page 183 from
the Selected Readings

3
Contents

Modernism
High-modernism
Post-modernism
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) and Spring
and all by William Carlos Williams

4
Modernism

As a literary term
Overview
Characteristics of Modernity/Modernism
Formal/Stylistic characteristics
Thematic characteristics

5
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6
Year that modernism starts
7

As a literary term
Modernism, as a literary style, emerged after
WWI, beginning in Europe and then progressing
into American literature by the late 1920s. After
the First World War many people questioned the
chaos and the insanity of it all. The worlds
universal truths and trust in authority figures
began to crumble, and Modernism as a literary
movement was a response to the destruction of
these beliefs.

Overview
Modernist literature can be viewed largely
in terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic
movement away from Romanticism, examining subject
matter that is traditionally mundane--a prime
example being The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Eliot.

Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of
experience, Modernist writers were more acutely
conscious of the objectivity of their
surroundings. In Modernism the object is the
language doesn't mean it is. This is a shift from
an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological
aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift from a
knowledge-based aesthetic to a being-based
aesthetic. This shift is central to Modernism.
Archibald MacLeish, for instance, said, "A poem
should not mean / But be."

Modernist literature often features a marked
pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism
apparent in Victorian literature. In fact, "a
common motif in Modernist fiction is that of an
alienated individual--a dysfunctional individual
trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly
urban and fragmented society." But the
questioning spirit of modernism could also be
seen, less elegaically, as part of a necessary
search for ways to make a new sense of a broken
world.

Modernist literature often moves beyond the
limitations of the Realist novel with a concern
for larger factors such as social or historical
change. This is prominent in "stream of
consciousness" writing. Examples can be seen in
Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens and Mrs Dalloway,
James Joyce's Ulysses, Katherine Porter's
Flowering Judas, Jean Toomer's Cane, William
Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and others.

Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in
large part, as a reaction to the emergence of
city life as a central force in society.

Characteristics of Modernity/Modernism
Formal/Stylistic characteristics
Thematic characteristics

Formal/Stylistic characteristics
Free indirect speech
Stream of consciousness
Juxtaposition of characters
Wide use of classical allusions
Figure of speech
Inter-textuality
Personification
Hyperbole
Parataxis
Comparison

Quotation
Pun
Satire
Irony
Antiphrasis
Unconventional use of metaphor
Symbolic representation
Psychoanalysis
Discontinuous narrative
Meta-narrative
Multiple narrative points of view

Thematic characteristics
Breakdown of social norms
Realistic embodiment of social meanings
Separation of meanings and senses from
the context
Despairing individual behaviors in the face
of an unmanageable future
Sense of spiritual loneliness
Sense of alienation
Sense of frustration

Sense of disillusionment
Rejection of the history
Rejection of the outdated social system
Objection of the traditional thoughts and the
traditional moralities
Objection of the religious thoughts
Substitution of a mythical past

18
Post-modernism
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20

As a liyerary school, it came about around the
end of WWII, though not actually studied as a
form until the mid 1980s. The characteristics are
the same as modernism except postmodernism is
more playful or celebratory regarding the world's
"insanity." The idea being, okay, the world is
chaotic, there are no universal truths, lets see
what we can do with that. Examples of postmodern
works include

Anais Nin's Under a Glass Bell (1944), William
Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
(1968), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987).
Both modernism and postmodernism may have all
or some of the above characteristics it isnt
required that all of the traits are used in order
for a piece to be classified as modernist
writing. The key characteristics are usually
fragmentation, loss, distrust of authority, and
the lack of universal truths.

22
High modernism
23

High modernism is a particular instance of
modernism, coined towards the end of modernism.
"High modernism", presumably is meant to specify
the most characteristic, developed, consistent,
or florid manifestation of modernism. The term is
used in literature, criticism, music and the
visual arts.

In one sense, "high modernism" is closely
associated with anthropologist and political
scientist James C. Scott, who uses the phrase in
a pejorative sense. Scott and his followers use
the phrase with an implied criticism of modernism
as austerely minimalist and excessively
rationalist or bureaucratic combined with a sense
of hubris in its claims about the inevitability
of progress, or its claim to embody progress.

In literature
The term "high modernism" as used in literary
criticism generally lacks the pejorative
connotations it has in other contexts. High
literary modernism, on the contrary, is generally
used to describe a subgenre of literary
modernism, and generally encompasses works
published between the end of the First World War
and the beginning of the Second.

Regardless of the specific year it was
produced, high modernism is characterized
primarily by a complete and unambiguous embrace
of what Andreas Huyssen calls the "Great Divide."
That is, it believes that there is a clear
distinction between capital-A. Art and mass
culture, and it places itself firmly on the side
of Art and in opposition to popular or mass
culture. (Postmodernism, according to Huyssen,
may be defined precisely by its rejection of this
distinction.)

Lists of canonical high modernists often include
James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound ,Virginia
Woolf ,E. M. Forster, Marcel Proust, Katherine
Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway
Gertrude Stein and Joseph Conrad (most of
whose work predates the generally accepted
time-frame of high literary modernism).
Whatever the literary schools are, they all
belong to modernism.

28
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
29
Outline

Life (p172)
His major works (p173-174)
His theories about literature (His the
impersonal theory of poetry or objective
correlative )
The basic themes of his criticism
Understanding of his The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock. And The Waste Land (p183)
V. His artistic features

His theories about literature
T. S. Eliot claimed himself a classiest in
literature, royalist in politics and
Anglo-Catholic in religion'.
His the impersonal theory of poetry or
objective correlative
?Emphasizes the relation of a poem to the
poems by other authors and suggests the
conception of poetry as a living whole of all
poetry that has ever been written.

?Focuses on the relation of the poem and its
author.
?Impressions and experiences important for the
man may take no place in the poetry.
?The relevance of a poem may be ascribed, not
to its reflection of the author's personality,
but to the fact that the author's mind is a
finely perfected medium in which varied feelings
are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

? The progress of an artist is a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality." Eliot saw that in this
depersonalization the art approaches science.
?Defined the objective correlative as a way of
expressing emotion by finding "a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula for that particular emotion."

?The objective correlative makes a poem
intellectually and emotionally intelligible to
the reader by presenting concrete circumstances
that evoke an abstract emotion. For an example of
the technique in action, consider the opening
stanza of his The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.
?"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,
but an escape from emotion it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape from
personality

The basic themes of his criticism
The relationship between tradition and
individual talent
The relation between the past, the present
and the future.

His artistic features
?Fresh visual imagery
?Flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm
?Full of quotations and allusions
?Images and symbols seem disconnected
?Lines in a number of foreign languages, lack of
narrative structure compounded by startling
juxtapositions,
?A sense of aloofness from the ordinary sensory
universe of day-to-day living.

36
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
37
Outline

Life
His literary ideas
Williams poetic method
Experiencing Spring and all by William Carlos
Williams

His literary ideas
Although his primary occupation was as a
doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His
work consists of short stories, poems, plays,
novels, critical essays, an autobiography,
translations and correspondence, often associated
with modernism and Imagism. Williams won the
Pulitzer Prize in May of 1963.

?As a young man Williams stayed true to imagist
style and principles and his early poems, such as
The Red Wheelbarrow,etc. are similarly laconic
and focused on things in the world rather than
abstractions. However, as he grew older Williams
distanced himself from the imagist ideas he had
helped to establish with Ezra Pound and Hilda
Doolittle, whom he ultimately rejected as being
"too European."

? (This break came on the heels of a brief
collaboration with Pound on T.S. Eliots epic
poem The Waste Land, which he derided as baroque
and obscure. Eliot's poem, despite its genius,
seemed to him years later a "great catastrophe to
our letters," a work of stylistic brilliance and
the learning, yet profoundly pessimistic its
description of modern culture as a "waste land."
Imagism, to Williams, had focused so intently on
images and things that it had lost its human
audience.)

?Williams disliked Ezra Pound's and especially T.
S. Eliot's frequent use of allusions to foreign
languages and Classical sources, as in Eliot's
The Waste Land.
?Williams most famously summarized his poetic
method in the phrase "No ideas but in things"
?He advocated that poets leave aside traditional
poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions,
and try to see the world as it is.

?Williams drew his themes from what he called
"the local."
?He sought to renew language through the fresh,
raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and
social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it
from what he saw as the worn-out language of
British and European culture.
?Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form,
an American form of poetry whose subject matter
was centered on everyday circumstances of life
and the lives of common people.

?Finding beauty in the commonplace was the goal
of Williams' poetry throughout his life, and
while as a young man he wrote about common
things, as he matured he came to write uncommon
thoughts with common words. The ordinary, the
local, becomes reinvigorated through the light of
the poetic imagination,

Williams poetic method
It is probably best summarized by the phrase
No ideas but in things, which is taken from his
1944 poem A Sort of Song. Williams strongly
advocated that poets abandon traditional forms
and unnecessary literary allusions and attempt to
seethe world directly and reflect that in their
writing.

45
Spring and all
46
Outline

Introduction
Brief Summary
Line-by-line understanding
Themes
Literary device (technique)

Introduction
In a lot of ways, Spring and All is a classic
William Carlos Williams poem short, beautiful,
and filled with simple images. It focuses on
making each moment as clear and sharp as
possible. Hes discovering poetry in the world
around him, in daily experience. Hes inventing a
style that doesnt need fancy words or references
to history in order to make its point or to amaze
reader with its beauty.

(But, before starting thinking that hes all
about plants and fruit and simple pretty words,
we should know where this poem comes from. It is
part of a much longer book called Spring and All,
which is CRAZY. Its a mix of poems, prose, and
all kinds of ideas about the imagination,
writing, history, and so on. The chapters are out
of order, and the sentences stop midway. In a lot
of ways, it sounds like a rant.)

Eventually, the book makes a kind of weird
sense, but it takes a lot of work to get there.
Luckily, Williamss genius also comes in
bite-sized pieces, like this poem. The bottom
line? Its easy to read and thats how its
supposed to be but theres a lot behind it, and
a lot going on under the surface.

Brief Summary
Someone has stopped by the side of a road that
leads to a hospital, and he or she is looking at
the landscape. This person (the speaker of the
poem) begins by describing the scene the dead
plants that cover everything at the end of
winter. Then, the poem shifts, and the speaker
describes the coming of spring, imagining how new
life will emerge from this landscape as it begins
to wake up.

51
Line-by-line summary

Section I (lines 1-8)
Line 1 By the road to the contagious
hospital
(Get out the highlighters for this first
line, because its really important.)
The phrase "By the road" begins to set the
scene. It doesnt tell us exactly where we are,
but it makes it easy to imagine the speaker
traveling, moving from Point A to Point B, and
stopping to look out over the landscape described
in the poem.

The last two words in the line make a much
bigger difference this road leads to the
"contagious hospital." (That phrase sounds like
bad news, a place you already dont want to go.)
The word "contagious" sets the mood for the
poem, so bear with us as we dig into the
background just a little.
It seems important to know that Williams earned
his living as a doctor. We cant know if this
poem is about an experience he had, but he
definitely would have been familiar with
hospitals.

The difference between an open field and a
hospital ward might seem clear to us, but it
would have been very real for Williams. At the
time that the poem was written, infectious
disease was still a big deal in America, and one
needed separate spaces to confine anyone with a
disease like smallpox.
Just keep in mind that the word "contagious"
makes the image of the hospital even more
intense. Its a place you really dont want to
end up in maybe even as a doctor.

Lines 2-4
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
Immediately, the road and the hospital
disappear, and the sentence continues with a
description of the clouds.
?(Thinking of your standard clouds, you might
imagine a sort of cheerful, fluffy thing in the
sky.
Heres is not these clouds. Theres nothing
scary about them exactly, but nothing comforting
either.)

These clouds dont "drift" or "float" they
"surge." These clouds rush into the poem, filled
with power, hurried along by the wind.
Where some clouds might be a comforting, even
white, these are "blue-mottled." the sentence
ends with "a cold wind."
This is definitely a poem thats designed to
make reader practically taste every word, to feel
how cold that wind is, to imagine that hospital
looming in the distance.
Bottom line, this starts out on a pretty bleak
note. Not miserable, necessarily, just a cold,
blustery and not-too-welcoming sky.

Lines 5-8
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
?It tells that things dont get a lot happier
here.
?For the first time, plants, brown and dry, are
seen as well as mud, dirty water, etc.
?However, what is brought before the eyes is a
"waste," as the speaker puts it an empty space,
without any life that the eye can see.

?Check out the sneaky way that he ties together
the pieces of this poem. In the sixth line, weeds
are "standing and fallen." Then, in the seventh,
"patches of standing water" is seen.
?As a common sense, weeds and water dont "stand"
in the same way, but the repetition of that word
fits those two lines together like puzzle pieces.
So, even if the landscape isnt exactly pretty,
it does "rhyme" in a way.
?Also, the next line includes the word "tall"
which sounds a lot like "fallen."

Section II (lines 9-15)
Lines 9-13
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-
More fun with dead plants.
?Around the edges, Williams does start to breathe
some life into the scene. Some new colors do
appear reddish and purplish but, for the most
part, were still up close and personal with dry,
brown leaves and trees.

Lines 14-15
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-
?Then, just as one might be getting tired of
this stuff WHAM. The poem shifts, and one
catches the first glimpse of spring.
?Spring doesnt happen right away in fact, it
sort of sneaks into the line, appearing in the
distance.
?At first, one cant even tell its there. The
landscape still seems "lifeless," just like the
vines in line 13 were "leafless."
?But, something has changed, and Williams wants
the reader to look more closely. Spring is there,
waiting for us to see it.

Even though there arent any real characters in
this poem, spring is introduced as if it has a
personality. Like some creature waking up, it is
"sluggish" and "dazed."
This is the first sign of life, and its also
the first thing Williams treats like a living
being.
Hes not going to beat the reader over the head
with it, but this is a big moment. The entire
book is called "Spring and All," and now heres
spring.

Section III (lines 16-23)
Lines 16-19
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-
?Now that weve had a line or two to get used to
spring, here come more new things. The next
section tells us that other things are
approaching, too.
?"They enter," Williams tells us, but who are
they? He only tells us a few things theyre
naked and cold, and, well, theyre entering.

Its a little bit of a mystery, and it forces us
to guess, to look for clues, and to read more
closely. We know that they are different from
"sluggish" spring, but we have to wait to learn
more.
Williams could just say who they are from the
beginning, but he teases us a little. He wants to
make his poems clear, but maybe not always too
easy.

Do you see how the image of these plants coming
into the world might make us think of human
babies being born? This is called
personification, and he uses it in a few spots in
the poem. Its one of a lot of ways that he
twists together the human and the natural worlds,
and suggests that theyre really just aspects of
the same thing.
See how he brings back that cold wind from the
fourth line?

Lines 20-23
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens clarity, outline of leaf
?Now, things start to pick up speed, and
Williams solves our mini-mystery.
?It looks like "they" are the new plants that
poke up through the dead leaves, although he
never quite comes out and says so.
Things get clearer, as spring takes hold.

Do you feel how the mood of the poem changes?
After the groggy feeling of winter, things are
beginning to thaw, to pop out and change.
For example, look at the word "quickens." Here,
it means "comes back to life," but it also hints
at the way the world speeds up in spring. Even
the sound of the word is fast and lively, the
opposite of the "sluggish" feeling the poem
talked about a minute ago.
Things are about to change, and, when they do,
it will move fast.

Section IV (lines 24-27)
Lines 24-27
But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
But were not quite in spring yet. The poem
gets ahead of itself.
This poem isnt about things actually happening
its about things beginning to happen. The word
"entrance" is really a key here. Were just
setting the stage for spring, not actually
watching the play thats about to start.
If Williams speeded things up in the last few
lines, now he slows them down again.

?Were back at the beginning point, in a way, but
something has changed. Down at the roots, things
are waking up. Were looking for things to happen
on the surface, but the real changes are going on
underground.
As you probably noticed, nothing much actually
happens in this poem. But, things are about to
happen. Basically, the "spring" that Williams
talks about isnt just happening in the poem. "By
the road to the contagious hospital" was written
at a big moment in history, a turning point for
art, poetry, etc. WWI was just over, the world
had changed, and people were looking for a way to
talk, think, and write about the modern world.

?Williams knew a lot about this he was friends
with tons of these "Modernist" artists, and he
was finding his own way to deal with these
questions. Lucky for us, he wrote simple,
beautiful poems that are actually fun to read.
Contrast to some of his friends, Ezra Pound, for
example, he made it a lot harder on themselves
and on their readers.

69
Themes

Man and the Natural World
Mortality
Transformation

Man and the Natural World
This is the big theme. Now, this could have
been a poem just about nature, and for the most
part, it is. But, someone is watching this
nature, and someone is talking about it. Williams
drives this point home hard by starting us out
with the road and the hospital. Those two places
are major symbols of the human world. They cut
through the landscape and shut it out. In order
for this poem to happen, the speaker and the
reader have to step out of these human spaces and
pay real attention to the natural environment.

?Quotes Thoughts on Man and the Natural World
By the road to the contagious hospital (line 1)
Thought This is about nature. So, why is this
important theme and not just a quick reference?
The fact is that it is a big clue. Williams uses
this line to set up different two worlds. On the
one hand, we have nature, with its fields, trees,
grass, etc. On the other hand, we have the world
of hospitals and roads, and, therefore, also the
world of jobs, cars, responsibilities, etc.

Mortality
Death opens this poem in a big way. Its hard
to think about a contagious hospital without
thinking about the possibility of death. If that
wasnt enough, the landscape turns out to be
dead, too. Check out the "dried weeds, standing
and fallen," and the "dead, brown leaves."
Ultimately, the whole world we see in this poem
is "lifeless in appearance." That last word is a
key, though. While a disease might make you
really dead, the land only "appears dead." The
payoff in the poem, the heartwarming conclusion,
is that this isnt the scary kind of death, but
the kind that leads to rebirth.

?Quotes Thoughts on Mortality (Lines 1, 4-6)
small trees with dead brown leaves under them
leafless vines (lines 11-13)
Thought Dead stuff. Since Williams repeats
himself a bit here, we can guess hes sending us
a message. He really wants us to soak up this
idea of a dead landscape. He wants us to see and
feel how lifeless winter can be. He even uses a
word, "leafless," that sounds really similar to
"lifeless." If we really feel all of the weight
of death at the beginning, then the turn towards
life hits us even harder.

Transformation
Transformations are a major way Williams
approaches nature in this poem. What he describes
is "just" the changing of the seasons, but he
makes it into a really big event. The world is
changing, transforming itself from brown to
green, from dead to living, from cold and windy
to calm and warm. As Williams puts it "the
profound change has come upon them." Its the big
shift in the poem, so its definitely worth
underlining here.(answer to question 2 on p193)

?Quotes Thoughts on Transformation (lines
20-21, 25-26)
sluggish dazed spring approaches (lines 14-15)
Thought This is the beginning of the change. Up
to this point, everything has been lifeless and
still. Nothing has changed in the landscape. Now,
something new is coming. The transformation
doesnt happen all at once. Williams points out
that spring is still sluggish (talk about a word
that sounds like what it means!), but things are
waking up.

Literary device (technique)
Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
Form and Meter
Speaker Point of View
About the title

Literary device (technique)
Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
Spring
As you might have guessed from the title, Spring
is a pretty important part of this poem.
Eventually, it emerges as a kind of weird main
character, taking on almost human characteristics
as it changes the world of the poem.
(Lines 14-15 Our first glimpse of spring. When
it shows up, it is described as being "sluggish
and dazed." These words usually apply to humans,
and, when they are used to describe an object or
an idea like spring, thats called
personification.

Line 25 Heres a point that Williams fills in a
little bit in other places in the book "Spring
and All." The "profound change" of springs
arrival is a metaphor for the changes that are
sweeping over the whole world in the early 20th
Century. World War I is over people are
producing new and exciting art and philosophy,
and starting to see some new prosperity. In a
general sense, spring has always been a symbol of
new beginnings, but Williams definitely has some
specific things to say about his moment in
history.)

Plants
The poem is chock full of plants, both the dead
old ones that Winter has left behind, and the new
ones that are emerging with spring.
(Lines 9-13 This is a pretty long description
of dead plants, especially for a poem this short.
This tips us off to the importance of these
plants as an image of cold and lifeless winter.
More generally, they are symbols of the death
that must come before rebirth and new
possibility.
Line 16-18 These new plants are compared to
human babies, another use of personification).

The Hospital
The man-made objects that open the poem have a
big influence on the way we look at the nature
scenes that follow. The hospital becomes a kind
of lens that changes the way we see the world in
the poem.
(Line 1 The image of the contagious hospital
puts us (just for a moment) in a completely human
world. Everything that follows is natural, but
here, for just a second, were stuck in a place
of disease, with its white sheets and the smell
of disinfectant. ) Williams is too sly to tell us
exactly

what the hospital means, but, sitting where it
does, we can be sure that this isnt just a
random location.
Then again, if were going to make a deal out of
the hospital, it wouldnt be fair to leave out
the road. Its not as exciting as a "contagious
hospital," but its a pretty important symbol,
especially in America. In so many books and
movies, it stands for freedom and possibility. On
the other hand, roads can also make us think of
danger, loneliness, and the violation of nature.)

Form and Meter Free Verse
This poem doesnt have a regular meter, and the
lines dont rhyme. This is "free verse." Williams
wasnt real interested in the fancy traditions of
poetry, and he was working hard to avoid getting
stuck in old ways of doing things. He needed a
poetic style that was modern, unpretentious, and
direct, and thats pretty much what he got in his
poem. The choice of words, the arrangement of the
lines, and the use of images in this poem are all
very precise, and designed to create specific
effects.

Speaker Point of View
Our speaker is someone who stops by the side of
a road, looking at the landscape in late winter
and telling us about it. But we dont know much
else. Now, we always make a point of saying that
the speaker is a fictional character, a creation
of the author, rather than the author himself.
Even if the poem is autobiographical, the speaker
is still a made-up version of the author.
In this case though, we know that Williams was a
doctor, and so it seems convenient that this
character would be headed to a hospital.

About the title
This poem was the first in the book "Spring and
All," and the only title Williams gave it was "I"
People who needed a way to refer to this poem
just called it by its first line "By the road to
the contagious hospital. As the poem became more
popular, it got pulled out of the book it was
published in, and started to be printed as a
stand-alone poem. In some cases, the books title
was slapped onto the poem.

If the poem is called "Spring and All," then we
may not be so surprised when spring finally
appears in the middle. If the poem has no title
except the first line, maybe the appearance of
spring will feel like more of a change.
In the summary for line 1 (above), we talked
about how the contagious hospital looms over the
poem, so maybe we have a sense of how it works as
a title.

The "Spring" part makes a lot of sense, but how
about the "and All?" If we look at it from one
side, these two words provide the little bit of
mystery and extra complication that Williams
loves. His poems focus on basic ideas and simple
images, but they approach them in a way that
forces you to think a little more about their
meaning. Adding the "and All" gives your
imagination some space to play, to think of new
and different possibilities.
---- The
end