123:. He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the fish. He said he didn't feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.
103:, an American photographer-painter whom Williams met shortly before composing the poem. The poem represents an early stage in Williams' development as a poet. It focuses on the objective representation of objects, in line with the Imagist philosophy that was ten years old at the time of the poem's publication. The poem is written in a brief,
144:, it was simply titled "XXII", denoting the poem's order within the book. Referring to the poem as "The Red Wheelbarrow" has been frowned upon by some critics, including Neil Easterbrook, who said that such reference gives the text "a specifically different frame" than which Williams originally intended.
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Of course you can't figure it out by studying the text. The clues aren't there. This poem was meant to be appreciated only by a chosen literary elite, only by those who were educated, those who had learned the back story (Williams was a doctor, and he wrote the poem one morning after having treated a
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At the time, I remember being mystified by the poem. However, being properly trained in literary criticism, I wondered what the real meaning of the poem was, what it was really about. ... What is left out of
Williams' poem is the fact that when he conceived that image he was sitting at the bedside of
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believe that the meaning of the poem and its form are intimately bound together. They state that "since the poem is composed of one sentence broken up at various intervals, it is truthful to say that 'so much depends upon' each line of the poem. This is so because the form of the poem is also its
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I remember well the sneer associated with sentimentality in the university
English classes of the early 70s. William Carlos Williams' celebrated red wheelbarrow poem was written after a night at the bedside of a desperately sick child, but to directly mention the child and describe that situation
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This poem is reported to have been inspired by a scene in
Passaic, New Jersey, where Williams was attending to a sick young girl. Worried that his patient may not survive, Williams looked out the window and saw the wheelbarrow and
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Peter Baker analyzed the poem in terms of theme, writing that "Williams is saying that perception is necessary to life and that the poem itself can lead to a fuller understanding of one's experience."
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a very sick child (Williams was a medical doctor). The story goes that as he sat there, deeply concerned about the child, he looked out the window, saw that image, and penned those words.
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Prior to the revelation about
Marshall, some critics and literary analysts believed that the poem was written about one of Williams' patients, a little girl who was seriously ill:
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and prose. Only sixteen words long, "The Red
Wheelbarrow" is one of Williams' most frequently anthologized poems, and a prime example of early twentieth-century
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406:, ed. by Wirote Aroonmanakan. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press, 2007, pp. 209–216. Troyer cites Lezlie Couch's 1987 essay "So Much Depends" (
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Kenneth
Lincoln saw humor in the poem, writing "perhaps it adds up to no more than a small comic lesson in the necessity of things in themselves."
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would have been to court pathos. Such a poem would have been fit only for greeting cards or the poor souls who didn't know any better than to like
191:, Mark Hama "proposes that what Williams likely recognized in his friend Johns’s poem was the framework for a new modern American poetic line."
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In 2015, research identified the man who had inspired the work as
Thaddeus Lloyd Marshall Sr., who lived a few blocks away from Williams in
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544:""Blue Under-Shirts upon a line": Orrick Johns and the genesis of William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow""
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in 1915—may have provided the framework upon which
Williams developed "The Red Wheelbarrow". In his 2010 essay in
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meaning." This viewpoint is also argued by Henry M. Sayre who compared the poem to the readymade artwork of
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Easterbrook, Neil (1994). "'Somehow
Disturbed at the Core': Words and Things in William Carlos Williams".
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Hollander, John. Vision and
Resonance: Two Sense of Poetic Form. Copyright © 1975 by Oxford UP.
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sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught
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The pictorial style in which the poem is written owes much to the photographs of
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Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890–1999
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form. With regard to the inspiration for the poem, Williams wrote in 1954:
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Modern Poetic Practice: Structure and Genesis. New York: Peter Lang, 1986.
471:"Modernist Journals | Others. A Magazine of the New Verse. Vol. 1, No. 1"
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586:. Copyright 1983 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
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fantasy/SF review magazine, vol. 18, Spring 1997. Entire text online at
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Critical Essays on "The Red Wheelbarrow" and other poems by Williams
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40:, a hybrid collection which incorporated alternating selections of
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337:"Poet William Carlos Williams' muse found, honored in Rutherford"
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244:(New York: Contact Editions / Dijon: Maurice Darantière, 1923).
295:"The Progression of William Carlos Williams' Use of Imagery"
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child who was near death. The red wheelbarrow was her toy.)
30:. Originally published without a title, it was designated "
410:, v76 n7 pp. 29-35, November 1987) for this information.
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to slow down the reader, creating a "meditative" poem.
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William Carlos Williams Center for the Performing Arts
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Robert A. Troyer, "So Much Depends Upon Linguistics".
181:' "Blue Under-Shirts Upon a Line"—first published in
131:, and is buried in Ridgelawn Cemetery in neighboring
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610:. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
203:cited "The Red Wheelbarrow" as a good example of
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436:(University of Alberta Press, 2011), p. 119.
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584:The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams
434:Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science
316:Williams, William Carlos (November 1954).
138:When the poem was originally published in
628:Haj Ross on the linguistics of the poem
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743:Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems
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335:Pugliese, Nicholas (18 July 2015).
240:Williams, William Carlos, "XXII",
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873:Poetry by William Carlos Williams
460:website, reprinted by permission.
423:(New World Library, 2004), p. 69.
727:The Desert Music and Other Poems
448:, "On Writing as a Fantastist".
711:An Early Martyr and Other Poems
254:Hefferman, James A. W. (1991).
16:Poem by William Carlos Williams
256:"Ekphrasis and Representation"
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835:William Carlos Williams Award
830:William Carlos Williams House
762:Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
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454:On Writing as a Fantasist
34:" in Williams' 1923 book
299:Writing for a Real World
293:Cho, Hyun-Young (2003).
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342:The Record
229:References
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