Page "William Carlos Williams" Paragraph 6

A few years later, Williams published one of his seminal books of poetry, Spring and All, which contained classic Williams poems like " By the road to the contagious hospital ," " The Red Wheelbarrow ," and " To Elsie.

" However, in 1922, the year before Williams published Spring and All, T. S.

Eliot published The Waste Land which became a literary sensation and overshadowed Williams ' very different brand of poetic Modernism.

In his Autobiography, Williams would later write, " I felt at once that Waste Land had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did.

Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself — rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.

" And although he respected the work of Eliot, Williams became openly critical of Eliot's highly intellectual style with its frequent use of foreign languages and allusions to classical and European literature ..

Instead, Williams preferred colloquial American English.