Spring and All

In effect, Spring and All all but disappeared as a cohesive text until its republication nearly ten years after Williams’ death.

[3] In The Autobiography, Williams would later write, "I felt at once that The 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".

"But unlike Eliot, who responded negatively to the harsh realities of this world, Williams saw his task as breaking through restrictions and generating new growth."

Their poetry focused on verbal pictures and moments of revealed truth, rather than a structure of consecutive events or thoughts and was expressed in free verse rather than rhyme."