The Red Wheelbarrow

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Williams’ spare poem brings together two apparently incongruous literary traditions of his time: Romanticism and Imagism. An example of Romanticism is Walt Whitman’s liberating free verse and his perspective of the world as a spiritual plane of expression. Imagism, an early 20th-century movement founded by Williams’ lifelong friend and mentor Ezra Pound, was inspired by innovations in photography. This movement celebrated the direct presentation of images in measured poetic lines free of the self-indulgent verbiage that defined much British and American public poetry at the turn of the century.

Pound expounded at length about the poet’s responsibility to present the image without commentary, imported wisdom, or layers of themes; Williams’ himself famously argued, “No ideas but in things.” Nothing belonged in the poem save the image the poet shared. Given the weight of poetic traditions that long elevated the poet to a central position in the poem, this was a revolutionary concept. The thing, not a symbol but a thing, centers a poem. “The Red Wheelbarrow” then takes Whitman’s delight in the world all around the poet, the sense of how that world was charged with a spiritual intensity that transcended its otherwise pedestrian shapes and colors, but expresses that delight with restraint.

Historical Context

“The Red Wheelbarrow” refuses to engage its historic moment. Compelled in part by Williams’ own disdain for the intellectual social critique that shaped T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “The Red Wheelbarrow” reflects a much quieter, much less grand historical context: the poet’s own biography. The understated grandness of Williams’ poem is informed by his background in the sciences rather than the arts and his profession as a doctor with a specialty in pediatrics.

First, the poem reflects the cool, clean eye of the scientist. The recording of the images in the poem is done with a clinical objectivity and close attention to detail. It reflects Williams’ training in the sciences. Unlike other Modernist poets of his generation, university-trained in the arts, Williams understood the responsibility of the open and careful eye, the value of cool observation, and the gathering of accurate data. Thus, the poem reflects no abstract adjectives that might lend themselves to interpretation. The poem deals in colors and location and remains true to the surfaces of things. It is less a poem than a data point.

Yet that fidelity to observation is infused with the wonder of a child. A pediatrician, Williams immersed himself in the world of children; he listened to their questions, felt their joy, and watched them learn about the world every day. The poem is rendered in clean lines and in the accurate precision of a scientist, but the simple and direct language echoes the wonder of a child exploring a world that still enchants. After all, an adult would most likely pass a wheelbarrow and chickens without noticing the miracle there. In the collection in which “The Red Wheelbarrow” first appeared, Williams offered other snapshot moments about sweet plums in a refrigerator; the design on the front of a passing fire engine; a cat carefully picking his way along a shelf; and the shattered fragments of a green bottle in an alley. They are poems that reflect the animated perceptions of a child still too young to be complacent and still too full of wonder to surrender to indifference.