Spring and All
Published the same year as The Waste Land and a deliberate counter-argument to it. Where Eliot fled to European high culture, Williams insisted on "No ideas but in things." The red wheelbarrow, the plums in the icebox, the doctor's intimate observations of his patients: Williams built a distinctly American modernism from local particulars. His "variable foot" influenced Ginsberg, O'Hara, the New York School, and half the American poetry that followed.
Most readers know the red wheelbarrow; few know it sits inside fifty-odd pages of manifesto prose with chapters numbered out of sequence, half Dada prank, half grudge against Eliot. That prose repeats itself, contradicts itself, and trails off. As a book it is a scrapbook, and the handful of permanent poems never needed the apparatus.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
