ogress against the growing orthodoxy of Eliot criticism." But while the Eliot wave undoubtedly sank his spirits, at the same time it buoyed his determination: "It was a shock to me that he was so tremendously successful," Williams admitted. "My contemporaries flocked to him--away from what I wanted. It forced me to be successful." According to Breslin, The Waste Land was one of the "major influence[s] on that remarkable volume," Williams's next book, Spring and All. The last in a decade of experimental poetry, Spring and All viewed the same American landscape as did Eliot but interpreted it differently. Williams "saw his poetic task was to affirm the self- reliant, sympathetic consciousness of Whitman in a broken industrialized world," Stauffer noted. "But unlike Eliot, who responded negatively to the harsh realities of this world, Williams saw his task as breaking through restrictions and generating new growth." Fox explained how Williams used the imagination to do just that: "Williams... sees the real function of the imagination as breaking through the alienation of the near at hand and reviving its wonder." Williams himself explained in one of Spring and All's prose passages that "imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it a description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it--It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but--." Just as meeting Pound had measurably affected Williams's early life, the appearance of Eliot's The Waste Land marked important changes in his mid-career. Though some of Williams's finest poetry appeared in the 1923 Spring and All, he did not release another book of poems for nearly ten years. "One reason," specul...
