The Red Wheelbarrow

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William Carlos Williams' 1923 poem The Red Wheelbarrow exemplifies the Imagist-influenced philosophy of “no ideas but in things”. The poem, written in five minutes or so, is said to portray the scene outside the window of one of Dr. Williams' patients, a very sick young girl he was attending in Passaic, New Jersey.[1] This provides another layer of meaning beneath the surface reading. The poem is supposed to be bare and plain. Williams was trying to veer away from what he saw as the “European” wordiness of other poets, to create a typical “American” image with his poem.[citation needed]

The subject matter of The Red Wheelbarrow is what makes it the most distinctive and important. He lifts a brazier to an artistic level, exemplifying the importance of the ordinary; as he says, a poem “must be real, not 'realism', but reality itself." In this way, it holds more in common with the haiku of Bashō than with the verse of T. S. Eliot.

Contents

[edit] Composition and publication

Williams' inspiration for "The Red Wheelbarrow" came from a scene that he witnessed while attending to a sick young girl in Passaic, New Jersey. Fearing for her life, Williams glanced through the window and saw the wheelbarrow and chickens.[1] The pictorial style in which the poem is written owes much to the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and the precisionist style of Charles Sheeler, an American photographer-painter whom Williams met shortly before composing the poem.[2] The poem represents an early stage in Williams' evolution as a poet. It focuses on the objective representation of an object, in line with the Imagist philosophy that was only ten years old at the time of the poem's publication. Williams' later works sacrifice some of this objective clarity in order to personalize the image for the reader. This is clearly illustrated in the poet's longest piece, Paterson, the first book of which was published in 1942. In this later work, Williams writes a prose-like monologue, which stands in stark contrast to the brief, haiku-like form of The Red Wheelbarrow.[3]

The Red Wheelbarrow was originally published in Williams' 1923 anthology of mixed poetry and prose titled Spring and All. It was originally simply titled "XXII", denoting its place within the anthology. Referring to the poem as "The Red Wheelbarrow" has been frowned upon by some critics, including Neil Easterbrook, who said that it gives the text "a specifically different frame" than that which Williams originally intended. The poem is removed from its place in the anthology, and takes on a different meaning on its own.[4]

[edit] Text

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

[edit] Analysis

[edit] Structure

The poem has a distinct pattern, with alternating lines of two and one stressed syllables. The work seems to attempt to reach a specific combination of stresses, but purposely misses each time. In the table below, the desired combination would be represented as uMuS/Mu. This relates to Williams' basic doctrine that by examining an object in all of its immediacy, we can come into contact with something universal. There is a universal order to be found in the poem, but the individual lines never reach it. Rather, the particularity of each line gestures toward the underlying universal pattern.[5]


The Red Wheelbarrow - Stress and rhythm analysis[6]
Line Text Stress pattern Syllables
1 so much depends uMuS 4
2 upon uM 2
3 a red wheel uM S 3
4 barrow Mu 2
5 glazed with rain MuS 3
6 water Mu 2
7 beside the white uMuS 4
8 chickens Su 2

key:

u: unstressed syllable

S: stressed syllable

M: medium stressed syllable

[edit] Content

The first line of the poem is open-ended. [7]

a lot of attention has been payed to the word "glazed" in the fifth line of the poem. It is the only word in the poem that can be said to carry an aesthetic meaning.[8] The French literary critic and theorist Michael Riffaterre said that this word is "the real agent of the poem's efficacy", because it transforms the wheelbarrow into an object of aesthetic contemplation.[9]

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ a b Couch, Lezlie Laws (1987). ""So Much Depends"... on How You Begin: A Poetry Lesson". The English Journal 76 (7): 29. doi:10.2307/818642. 
  2. ^ Hefferman, James A. W. (1991). "Ekphrasis and Representation". New Literary History 22 (2). 
  3. ^ Cho, Hyun-Young (2003). "The Progression of William Carlos Williams’ Use of Imagery". Writing for a Real World 4. 
  4. ^ Easterbrook, Neil (1994). ""Somehow Disturbed at the Core": Words and Things in William Carlos Williams". South Central Review 11 (3): 25. doi:10.2307/3190244. 
  5. ^ Gee, James Paul (1985). "The Structure of Perception in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams: A Stylistic Analysis". Poetics Today 6 (3): 375. doi:10.2307/1771902. 
  6. ^ adapted from Gee (1985). S represents strong stress on a syllable, M moderate stress, and u little or no stress.
  7. ^ Beach, Christopher (2003). The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 100. 
  8. ^ Beach (2003), p. 100
  9. ^ Halter, Peter (1994). The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge University Press, 179.