Williams Vs. Eliot

A detailed Summary of Williams Vs. Eliot

William Carlos Williams' almost obvious response to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," often called "By The Road," and then finally titled "Spring And All," can be seen as both a response to Eliot, and an adage to the prologues of the past (Frye). One can almost see the idea for "Spring And All" leaping out of Williams' head and onto paper immediately after reading Eliot's "The Waste Land" in The Dial. A battle of lyrical and poetic heavyweights, if you will, was about to take the stage. Williams' response was a much needed second angle on the pessimistic and thoroughly questioning picture that Eliot was trying to paint.

It makes one wonder how many people truly took notice of this dialogue between literary artists in the early 20th century. Were there many that took notice of their revelations and proclamations to a war torn and ravaged world? This was most undoubtedly their aim. Even with Williams being a hopeless medical romantic, and with Eliot being a tortured soul, and a pessimist in most senses of the word, they were both working and picking at the same scab. It was this worldwide elitism and genetic sickness that was plaguing people, and both writers seemed to agree on that. Williams simply re-writes Eliot's work thr

Williams' poem, although much shorter than Eliot's, immediately gives the reader the feeling that there's going to be some sort of a payoff, or a revelation, before the end. It's this simple element that defines the response Williams offers up. Williams has a "wildcarrot leaf" (the only species of plant, or anything else for that matter, that Williams names directly) curling up through the bushes and leaves, which leads one to think of birth, rather than the death and fading that is portrayed throughout "The Waste Land" (Williams, 168). The flow via syntax that Williams produces keeps us racing through "Spring and All" as well. By doing this, Williams has us running to the end of the poem to find our own "profound change" (Williams, 168). The profound change that Williams offers up in comparison to Eliot's is optimism. Maybe World War I was absolutely horrible, but that doesn't give us all the excuse to stop trying. It seems that this is what Williams was trying to embody within his response.

ough the first thirteen lines of his "Spring and All," almost in a respectful manner, but then goes further with it, and takes it to an optimistic climax. This is something that Eliot was simply not capable of. In doing this Williams has the last word, and makes the more powerful point of the two. While Eliot's "The Waste Land" was highly regarded as a work that gave poetry back to the scholastic community, it was Williams' "Spring and All" that one upped Eliot in its message.

The first line Williams composes within "Spring and All," "By the road to the contagious hospital," immediately implies a feeling of going somewhere (Williams, 167). This is something that the reader is never offered when reading Eliot's "The Waste Land." If you know Williams, then you know that he loved his time in working with his patients, and in understanding this, one can deduce by the end of the poem, that the "contagious hospital" might not be such a bad place after all (Williams, 167). Although Williams admittedly took as much pride in his writing as he did in his medical work,

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Approximate Word count = 1401
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English