about the site
the wheelbarrow
The website The Wheelbarrow gets its name from the poem
The Red Wheelbarrow written by Williams Carlos Williams in 1923.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
It exemplifies the Imagist-influenced philosophy of “no ideas but in things”. The poem, written in two minutes or so, portrays the scene outside the window of one of Dr. Williams' patients, a very sick child he was attending. This provides another layer of meaning beneath the surface reading. The poem is intentionally plain and lucid. Williams was trying to veer away from what he saw as the “European” verbosity of his peers (T. S. Eliot, for example), to create a typical “American” image with his poem.
The subject matter of The Red Wheelbarrow is what makes it most unique and important. He lifts an ordinary scene to an artistic level, exemplifying the importance of the ordinary; as he says, a poem “must be real, not 'realism', but reality itself."
