Poem of the Week – The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

While TS Eliot and Ezra Pound were busy composing long, mythical poems that mournfully comment on the waning power and plight of our species, New Jersey-based physician William Carlos Williams was discovering the poetry in ordinary things.

An early advocate of Imagist literature, Carlos Williams sought to limn everyday objects and instances with a simple vocabulary and distilled style, a style that was tempered by enjambment and executed with bathos.

His often parodied “This Is Just to Say” was based on a note he left his wife to apologise for gobbling up the fruit she was saving for her breakfast. He wanted to point out that poetry is evident in the simplest exchanges and can be exhumed from the most basic perceptions.

Williams’ use and comprehension of words in poetry are comparable to the conception of colours possessed by contemporary painters. The delineations he vividly draws achieve a sumptuous lucidity via an intended simplicity.

This week’s poem is one of Williams’ best-known imagist verses. As revered critic Hugh Kenner, noted, The Red Wheelbarrow breaks with the tradition of a single line constituting a unit of thought.

Meaning, when Shakespeare wrote “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate”, the bard was conforming to the tradition in western verse of expressing a distinct idea per line.

Williams radically rejected these ancestral assumptions and in this week’s selection strove to create a new kind of poetry. Published in William’s innovative collection, “Spring and All”, in 1923, The Red Wheelbarrow is considered one of the most influential poems of the last century.

We hope you enjoy this week’s choice as much as we did.

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams (1923)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens