'The Red Wheelbarrow' William Carlos Williams poem so much depends upon a red wheel = Imagism

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens
____________________


William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883.

His grandmother, an Englishwoman deserted by her husband, had come to the United States with her son, remarried, and moved to Puerto Rico. Her son, Williams' father, married a Puerto Rican woman of French Basque and Dutch Jewish descent.

Williams attended school in Rutherford until 1897, when he was sent for two years to a school near Geneva and to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris.

He attended the Horace Mann School upon his return to New York City.  Passing a special examination, he was admitted in 1902 to the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1906.

His first book, Poems, was published in 1909.

Williams married Florence Herman (1891--1976) in 1912 after his proposal to her older sister was refused.

They moved into a house in Rutherford, New Jersey, which was their home for many years. Then his second book of poems, The Tempers, was published by a London press through the help of his friend Ezra Pound, whom he met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania.

Although his primary occupation was as a family doctor, Williams had a successful literary career as a poet.

He wrote poetry, short stories, plays, novels, essays, and translations.

He practiced medicine by day and wrote at night. Early in his career, he briefly became involved in the Imagist movement through his friendships with Pound and H.D. (whom he also befriended at the University of Pennsylvania), but he drifted from that movement since he had different views.

In 1915 Williams associated with a group of New York artists and writers known as "The Others."

In 1920, Williams was sharply criticized by many peers (like H.D., Pound, and Wallace Stevens) when he published one of his most experimental books, Kora in Hell: Improvisations.

Pound called the work "incoherent" whereas H.D. thought the book "flippant."

Williams book titled Spring and All contained classic Williams poems like "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "To Elsie."

However, in 1922, the year before Williams published Spring and All, T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land--a literary sensation.  Eliot's work overshadowed Williams' very different brand of poetic Modernism.

In his Autobiography, Williams later wrote, "I felt at once that The Waste Land had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit."

Although he respected the work of Eliot, Williams became openly critical of Eliot's highly intellectual style with its frequent use of foreign languages and allusions to classical and European literature.

Williams preferred to make poems from colloquial English (American style)--that is, from language spoken on the street.

Williams Carlos Williams died on March 4, 1963.








"The Red Wheelbarrow" William Carlos Williams poem so much depends upon a red wheel = Imagism

Imagism