The Red Wheelbarrow is a poem by, and often considered the masterwork of, American 20th-century writer William Carlos Williams. The 1923 poem exemplifies the Imagist-influenced philosophy of “no ideas but in things.” This provides another layer of meaning beneath the surface reading. The style of the poem forgoes traditional British stress patterns to create a typical “American” image.[1]
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.
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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' development 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]
With regard to the inspiration for the poem, Williams wrote that it
sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. He used to tell me how he had to work in the hold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the fish. He said he didn’t feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.[4]
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.[5]
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.[6]
| Line | Text | Stress pattern | Syllables |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | so much depends | MMuM | 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
"The Red Wheelbarrow" is recited in the 2010 Woody Allen movie You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger by Josh Brolin's character to Naomi Watts's character. Like William Carlos Williams, Brolin's character is also a physician turned writer.[8]
"The Red Wheelbarrow" is also carved in the wall in Pennsylvania Station in New York City.