Close Talking

Connor and Jack discuss the newly resonant poem "[By the road to the contagious hospital]" by the great William Carlos Williams, which is the first poem in Williams' iconic Spring and All. They explore the now-emergent "pandemic in spring" sub-genre, which this poem is surely canon. They also talk about the poem's modernist context, its grounded attention to detail and nature, and its striking first line. [By the road to the contagious hospital] By: William Carlos Williams By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines— Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches— They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they