The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams
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so much depends upon
a red wheelbarrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens.
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William Carlos Williams was born on September 17, 1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey.
When he was sixteen, he had a heart attack in the final lap of a race he was running. After that he wasn’t allowed to play with his friends because he had a heart condition. Resting at home gave him time to write, read, and think.
At the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his medical degree, Williams met poet Ezra Pound, who influenced his writing and remained friends with him throughout his lifetime.
For a while, Williams merely copied Keats’ poems in his own words. Williams’ first poems were turned down by the periodicals to which he submitted them. His poetry didn’t often rhyme and consisted mostly of short stanzas. His good poems painted images for the readers.
For example, in his poem The Red Wheelbarrow, one can see the red wheelbarrow, after a rain storm, with the white chickens clucking around it.
Williams loved the romantic rhythm of Spanish poems and worked on translating Spanish poems on and off. His mother, who was from Puerto Rico, helped him with this. Ezra Pound assisted him in getting his work published. Williams’ first magazine publication appeared in Poetry in 1913.
Although he felt his poetry was overshadowed by T.S. Eliot’s, Williams’ influence as a poet spread slowly through the nineteen twenties and thirties.
Williams remained a physician as well as a poet on the advice of a man named Mr. Bates. Williams had shown him a manuscript, which was an imitation of Keats’ Endymion. Mr. Bates said to him, “Go on writing, but don’t give up medicine. Writing alone is not an easy occupation for a man to follow.”
Williams was interested in the world; he noticed and wrote about things that most people didn’t, like chimneys, wheelbarrows, rotten apples, daisies and old women eating plums. Williams was also an essayist and a playwright, and he wrote many books in prose. He wrote some of them about his wife’s family. One was entitled The Great American Novel, a travesty on what he considered conventional American writing.
He married a woman called Floss, who he described as “a shot of whiskey, her disposition cantankerous, riding her man for his own good whether he liked it or not.” Floss helped with and inspired many of her husband’s poems.
Two months after Williams died in 1963, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his influential and modern poetry. He pioneered a direct and realistic approach, and he, like T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, changed the face of modern American poetry. He is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.
Tags: ezra pound, red wheelbarrow, ts eliot, william carlos williams