Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

REVIVING AMERICA WITH WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 147

so Williams urges us to “imagine the New World that rises to our windows”
every day.
Where The Waste Land intones “dead land... dull roots... dried tubers

... dead tree,” Williams’s title poem “Spring and All” relocates that landscape
just where, as a physician, he often found himself.

By the road to the contagious hospital

under the surge of the blue

mottled clouds driven from the

northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the

waste of broad, muddy fields

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water

the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

stuff of bushes and small trees

with dead, brown leaves under them

leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all

save that they enter. All about them

the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow

the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—

It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of

entrance—Still, the profound change

has come upon them: rooted, they

grip down and begin to awaken

As he was about to present this poem at Harvard in 1951, Williams stopped and
joshed his academic audience: “Now you notice what I said: there is nosubject
that the modern poem cannot approach, there is no selected material. It ’s what
you dowith a work of art, it ’s what you puton the canvas and how you put it on
that makes the picture. It ’s how the words fit in—poems are not made of thought,
beautiful thoughts, it ’s made of words! pigment! put on! here! there! made! actually! ”
Williams himself loved painting, like Hopkins, Lawrence, Elizabeth Bishop,
Derek Walcott. His “Spring and All” reads like a kinetic landscape-in-words.