The Red Wheelbarrow, and Its Creator
Poem of the Week (Poem, History, Analysis)
Table of Contents
- Poem and Analysis
- The Imagist Movement
- About William Carlos Williams
- Sources
1. Poem and Analysis
The Red Wheelbarrow
— William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Analysis
When you pull the poem in a few directions, the perspective, however simple it seems, is utterly elastic. William Carlos Williams was an Imagist, which contributed to the style of the poem — free verse, clear, and precise — but he was also writing in a time where Cubism was growing in popularity. It abandoned linear perspective and the idea that subjects should be drawn as they exist. Afterall, as anyone who has studied art will know,
“This is not a pipe.”
There is only one place where a thing lives honestly: in real space, unobserved. As soon as something has the ability to judge, reconstruct, and analyze another, the observed is transposed. Memories and even present experience are always polluted by our perspective of the world, and this is represented in the art we create. Cubists realized that for centuries people have tried to recreate something exactly as it exists (from the artists’ perspective) from one angle. Now all we have are different examples of “Fake news from the past,” as Donald Trump would say.
Three Singers Painting by Adam de Coster
In the second painting, there are a few different ways a viewer can look at the people and understand their situation. It’s a collection of little white lies that, in this case, make an ultimate truth. The first is a straight-shooting lie to any viewer, even the artist.
Like in Picasso’s “The Three Musicians,” “The Red Wheelbarrow” has a few different perspectives. Look below at what I have bolded.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
The poem separates the subjects from the few adjectives, making each part distinct and concrete. When you read, your eyes are drawn to shorter lines, so your brain emphasizes those three words. The poem draws you in with the enjambment because each subject is connected to an adjective, so in a way, you wait each stanza for the other shoe to drop.
or
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
or a quicker reader would see it as a whole sentence:
“So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens.”
The only mysterious part of the poem (What depends on these things?) is the left unexplained. Innocence, tradition, nothing at all, etc? Each reader has a choice.
“The Red Wheelbarrow” is honest and pure, contrasting with the wordy, overindulged, poems that came before it. There is a sense of duty in the poem (possibly springing from the red, white, and blue imagery, or perhaps its all-American subjects).
Williams would say that I’m reading too much into it. Afterall, “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens,” says exactly what it means. No bullshit.
2. The Imagist Movement
In the early twentieth century, Hemmingway, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams valued the economy of language, free-verse, and concrete imagery, which would eventually culminate in the Imagist movement; predating it was the French Symbolist movement, a cryptic, musically focused era. In contrast, the Imagist movement used simple objects to outline ideas. Much like Impressionists, Imagists focused on moments of real time, slowing readers to precise seconds. But while Impressionists used blur and unnatural colors, the Imagists wanted to provide readers with a clear sense of passing moments and the knowledge that as each second passes, objects adopt the irreversible quality of age. That second of perfection is what the Imagists capture.
From the Imagist Manifesto, the rules are as clear as the movement strived to be:
“To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the almost exact, nor the merely decorative word […] to produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite or dealing with vague generalities.”
In William Carlos Williams’ “To a Poor Old Woman,” one of the best examples of the economy of language lies in his enjambment. When talking about plums that a woman is eating, he breaks his lines down from the broadest to the narrowest sensational experience:
“They taste good to her.
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her.”
In my added bold, you can see the impact that the line breaks have on the viewer’s perspective. He uses only five words to convey his thoughts on judgment, relativity, and insipid poorness.
In Hilda Doolittle’s “Oread,” a reader is struck with a vivid, concrete, and heavily sensorial image. Movement is not a main quality of Imagist poems, but in this one, the whirling and splashing and hurling are simple verbs that wash over the reader with great clarity and impact.
Despite the immense paring Imagist writers take to their work and the simple words they use, the beautiful images that readers find within this movement causes them to move slowly through the texts, savoring each word as if the moment were really about to disappear.
3. About William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American physician (for forty years), poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. He, along with Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound led the Imagist movement, which later inspired the Beat Generation of the 1950s and 60s. As Randall Jarrell said, “There is no optimistic blindness in Williams, though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness.”
In his childhood, his family expected perfection. He wrote that “Terror dominated my youth, not fear.” But they also exposed him to literature and art, which he would appreciate later in his high school years. His grandmother (ironically named Emily Dickinson) loved theatre; his mother painted; and his father introduced Shakespeare, Dante, and the Bible to his sons. He would grow up to inspired by elegant Keats; as he said, “Keats was my God,” conflicted with the freeness of Whitman, and would feel overshadowed by Eliot later in his life. His friends also influenced his style (Pound, H.D., and painter Charles Demuth).
He would write more than thirty books. Poems (1909), his first book, was inspired by the locals that he tended to as a doctor. He remarked, “I was determined to use the material I knew.” His profession allowed him “to be present at deaths and births, at the tormented battles between daughter and diabolic mother.” Many of his poems were born on prescription blanks and between visiting patients. “He loved being a doctor, making house calls, and talking to people,” his wife would say.
When T.S Eliot rose to fame, he began to feel threatened with the enthusiasm people showed for what Williams saw as raw, real talent. He would say
“I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years and I’m sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself — rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.”
Williams would not release another collection after Spring and All (1923) for another ten years but would be privately focusing on America in his work. He would write about the Depression in his The Knife of the Times. James Guimond wrote, “Williams blamed the inadequacies of American culture for both the emotional and economic plight of many of his subjects.” Other books such as White Mules, In the Money, and The Build-Up also dissected Americans and our culture.
One of his most critically acclaimed books, Paterson, brough Williams back from relative obscurity. However, his newfound fame also caused him grief. In 1949 he was invited to become a consultant to the Library of Congress. This offer was later retracted when publisher of Lyric accused Williams of having “Communist” affiliations. She claimed that in his poem “Russia,” that he spoke “the very voice of Communism.” The Library of Congress wrote, “I accordingly hereby revoke the offer of appointment heretofore made to you.”
Williams had spent decades feeling abandoned, but when the Beat Generation, as Poetry Foundation said, “Declared him as the father of their poetry,” he felt a great sense of gratitude and purpose. Robert Lowell wrote, “Paterson is our Leaves of Grass.” Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Cid Corman were just a few poets who regarded Williams as a, if not the, main inspiration to their poems.
But while his influence was growing, his health was declining, and he experienced several heart attacks and strokes. And while he retired from medicine in 1951, his poetry would still remain his closest confidant, although would reflect upon his impending death. Hofstadter said, “In the face of death what Williams seeks is renewal — not a liberation toward another world but an intensified return to this one. Revitalization both of one’s inner energies and of one’s contact with the outside world, renewal is the product of two forces: love and the imagination. … Love and imagination are the essence of life. He who loses them is as good as dead.”
The Poetry Foundation says, “Williams’s weakened physical powers, apparently, strengthened his creative ones,” and he wrote several great works before dying. His wife would say, “I think he did much better work after the stroke slowed him down,” reflected Flossie. His last book, Pictures From Brueghel, won a Pulitzer Prize (posthumously) in 1963.
It had been on March 4, 1963, that he died in his sleep.
