January
January - context Summary
Published in 1923
Published in 1923 as part of Spring and All, William Carlos Williams’s "January" stages a brief dialogue between speaker and wind. The poem registers a modernist tension: external, derisive natural forces urge abandonment of the page, while the poet insists on fidelity to his sentences. Its spare lyric presents creative resistance as a quiet, stubborn act—an assertion of craft against noisy disruption.
Read Complete AnalysesAgain I reply to the triple winds running chromatic fifths of derision outside my window: Play louder. You will not succeed. I am bound more to my sentences the more you batter at me to follow you. And the wind, as before, fingers perfectly its derisive music.
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