“The Red Wheelbarrow” by Williams Carlos Williams

“The Red Wheelbarrow” by Williams Carlos Williams

Non-linear poetry... http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/BaliEng240/archives/2007/10/linear_vs_non-l.html

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The Red Wheelbarrow is a poem written by William Carlos Williams. Often considered the masterwork of American 20th-century poetry, the 1923 poem exemplifies the Imagist-influenced philosophy of “no ideas but in things.” This provides another layer of meaning beneath the surface reading. The style of the poem forgoes traditional British stress patterns to create a typical “American” image.^[1]

The subject matter of The Red Wheelbarrow makes the poem distinctive and important. Williams lifts a brazier to an artistic level, exemplifying the importance of the ordinary; as Williams says, a poem “must be real, not 'realism', but reality itself." In this way, the poem holds more in common with the haiku of Bashō than with the verse of T. S. Eliot.