This is Episode 29 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is "Spring and All", by William Carlos Williams

You can read the poem here.

John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, wrote a well-received book called Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide recently. There’s a conversation between Cleese and Iain McGilchrist, who has been both a practising psychiatrist and literary professor, and who has written vital books on the brain and the mind, including The Master and his Emissary, about the right-left brain divide. In the conversation they discussed poetry and Cleese said, "You shouldn’t try to explain a poem. You should experience it."

If my introductions to the poems I read five days a week here ever come across as an explanation, please feel free to ignore me, and just experience the poem instead.

William Carlos Williams was an American poet whose work spanned the first six decades of the 20th century. In a way he is similar to Wallace Stevens, in that he combined poetry with the professions (Stevens was a legal executive, Williams was a practicing doctor at a New Jersey Hospital for 40 years), but Williams’s poetry is sometimes seen as a little more accessible, maybe a little less complex, but in many ways no less powerful.

This poem, "Spring and All", is a poem about the stirring of the earth in the after-winter. One of the things it speaks to me is how occasional bleakness is always temporary, and always replaced by some new energy of life.

Music Credit:

Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com