Poetry Spotlight: The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

I have decided to spotlight the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow “ by William Carlos Williams. This poem is perhaps the most famous example of imagist poetry.  Imagist poetry is centred on one exclusive image, an image so deeply focused that it becomes the poem itself. Imagists insisted that a poem should get its power, not from the poet’s clever style, not the symbolism of its content, but from the emotions evoked by an image (An idea that can be traced back to the Japanese Haiku of the 16^th century).  Williams was an imagist whose aesthetic principles were largely focused on everyday life and the common man. It was an aesthetic that went against the grain of the critically acclaimed poets of the day such as the classicist, academic, and formal poetry exemplified by the likes of T. S. Eliot.

“The Red Wheelbarrow” is a poem composed of a single sentence broken up at various intervals. The poem’s opening lines set the tone for the entire poem, and its form and meaning are united as one. It is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is not the lines on the page that is the poetry, but the image of the wheelbarrow itself. The opening lines play an integral part at centring the notion of the image as the poetry; “so much depends/ upon” the wheelbarrow.  One of the things that strike me about the poem is how effective the poem is at breaking down the image. Notice how, in line 3, the monosyllabic words along with assonance, elongates the line and brings the reader’s attention to the unusual break between line 3 and 4. This effectively reduces the image to the sum of its parts the “wheel” and the “barrow”. We also receive a vivid injection of colour with “red”. This painterly language continues through lines 5 and 6, this time the adjective “glazed” is drawn to the reader’s attention, and transforms the image with the revelation of the rain. In the final lines we get the contrasting colour “white” of the chickens. Williams’ use of carefully selected diction, and unusual stanza breaks have effectively turned an ordinary sentence into a still life poem.

Williams has made the wheelbarrow the centre of the small universe in which it exists. The other objects in the poem, water and chickens, are defined by their relationship to the wheelbarrow.  In line 3 he introduces us to the object by referring to it as “a” wheelbarrow as if it is at that very moment that it is being noticed.  It is unfamiliar. When “the” chickens are mentioned they already have a context and background they are auxiliary objects, and minor details to the central image. This gravity that the wheelbarrow has at the poems core reveals to the reader how “everything depends upon” it.

The poem seeks to rethink some of the preconceptions of art and experience. Where often poets will set out to be complex and ornate, drawing attention to their language, Williams does the opposite keeping his language very simple allowing the reader to capture the essence of the image without imposing his thoughts. This feeds through into the poems structure; Williams was reluctant to enslave his experience into a set poetic pattern thus we get an inconsistent rhythm. What appears to be a poetic structure is not imposed by the poet, but is decided by the experience.

The beauty of this poem is its ability to take a rather everyday scene and turn it into an object of art with a space around it. It is almost as if you can walk around the words and get to know the object for what it is without the distraction of flowery poetics. As Jhan Hochman puts it, “The Red Wheelbarrow is an anti-poem, or a poem attempting to be, not so much a poem, but a hard object glazed with poetry.”