Imagination Station – Final Project

William Carlos Williams is the man of the hour and Spring and All is the name of our game. Critics say, “it is necessary, in fairness and in simple courtesy, to ask what kind of poet William Carlos Wil- liams was. The answer clearly begins with his failure to conform to the usual expectations” (Berry 30). It is this very tendency not to conform to the societal expectations of his day that interested us about the mind and writings of this fascinating poet. Invested in locality, Williams  “lived, practiced medicine, and wrote his poems in the same place all his life. He lived by the terms of a community involvement more constant, more intimate, and more urgent than that of any other notable poet of his time“(Berry 31). We found this important aspect of his life fascinating in relation to the role an intensely active imagination must have been in his work in order to create something new and original out of seemingly mundane places and things.

For our final project, we investigated the relationship between the numerous definitions of imagination found throughout Williams’ Spring and All and how it fits into the broader themes and defining ideas of Modernism as a whole. Because Spring and All deals so explicitly with the theme of imagination, it was very difficult to narrow it down to the ones we felt really expressed the spirit of Modernism and William Carlos Wiliams as a poet. Many seemed to say the exact same things, if slightly reworded. With the aid of many helpful and fruitful critical resources, we were able to match the imagination definitions from Spring and All to relevant critical support, and finally, to Modernism as a whole. We included our own interpretations of Williams’ definitions to provide the class with a concrete and concise vision of the section being discussed.

We decided the best way to showcase our research in an interesting way was to present to the class using Prezi. We liked the interactive nature of the platform and agreed our project requires optimum movability to navigate throughout the levels of our research. The Prezi guides you through a comprehensive path tying in the definitions with our own interpretations, our research, and to Modernism, ending with the citation of the source used for that particular path. Included below are the sources used for this post and for our connections to Modernism using our anthology.

Berry, Wendell. “from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford.” The American Poetry Review 2010: 27. Academic OneFile. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.

Ramazani, Jahan. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry. Richard Ellman. New York: W.W. Norton & Co Inc, 2007. Print.