The world will not accept the logic of its own ending. That is the lesson of nature when it transitions into spring, and Williams taps that energy. In his more than 15 years exploring the unsuspected power of everyday things igniting epiphanies, the images Williams retrieved from the world to shape the substance of his verse—wheelbarrows, fire engines, plums, wildflowers, mailboxes, old shoes—never require context. The argument of Williams’s poetry is always that the random collision of shapes, colors, textures, light, and shadow is its own context, sufficient unto itself.

That said, the image here of a late winter wasteland world edging at last into the promise of spring has resonance with the wasteland left behind by the catastrophe of World War I. As with most of the intelligentsia of his generation, Williams spent time Europe in the first years after the war with other expatriates and saw firsthand the impact of the brutalities of the war, a five-year conflict that killed more than 20 million Europeans and left much of central Europe in rubble, a geopolitical war that had in the end changed little of Europe’s geopolitical boundaries.

In 1923, just six years after the war grinded to a halt, when Williams first drafted this celebration of early spring, the

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