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John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Like Williams’s poem, Steinbeck’s novel was published during the Great Depression. The Grapes of Wrath takes on the devastation of this period much more directly than does “This Is Just to Say,” but it’s still worth putting the two works into conversation.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Steinbeck’s later novel, from 1952, is also worth linking to Williams’s poem. Both authors share an investment in capturing something true about the part of the American landscape they lived in. For Steinbeck that was the Salinas Valley in southern California, and for Williams that was the country landscape around Rutherford, New Jersey. Notably, both authors invested their work with symbolism from the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

Eliot’s Poetry

T. S. Eliot wrote very different poetry than Williams did, even though both poets were deeply influenced by their friendship with Ezra Pound. The triangle of influence makes them worth considering together, if only to understand the key differences in their overall poetic projects. In the case of Williams, the comparison to Eliot is particularly salient, since the 1922 publication of The Waste Land marked a hugely significant shift in English-language poetry that made it more difficult for Williams to gain critical recognition.

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