First published in 1921, Williams’s spare poem about the approach of winter, at once joyous and austere, passionately subjective and coolly objective, brings together two apparently incongruous literary traditions circulating in that time. On the one hand, the grand vision of the immediate world as a spiritual plane of expression defined in Walt Whitman’s deliberately excessive, liberated free verse (Whitman, after all, had only been dead 20 years); and, on the other hand, the precise, careful, Zen-like quiet defined by Imagism, the early-20th-century movement, inspired by innovations in photography and provided its philosophical argument in large part by Williams’s lifelong friend and mentor Ezra Pound. Imagism celebrated the direct presentation of images in carefully measured poetic lines, lines that were themselves deliberately freed of the ornate literariness and self-indulgent verbiage that had defined much British and American public poetry at the turn of the century.

Pound expounded at length about the poet’s responsibility to present the image cleanly and directly. No commentary, no imported wisdom, no layers of themes; Williams’s himself famously argued “No ideas but in things.” Nothing belonged in the poem save the image the poet shared.