The Red Wheelbarrow

"The Red Wheelbarrow" is a poem by American modernist poet and physician William Carlos Williams (1883–1963). The poem was originally published without a title and was designated as "XXII" as the twenty-second work in Williams' 1923 book Spring and All, a hybrid collection which incorporated alternating selections of free verse poetry and prose. It is one of Williams' most frequently anthologized poems, and is considered a prime example of early twentieth-century Imagism.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The pictorial style in which the poem is written owes much to the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and the precisionist style of Charles Sheeler, 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, haiku-like free-verse form. With regard to the inspiration for the poem, Williams wrote:

["The Red Wheelbarrow"] sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. 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.

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 Rutherford, New Jersey and is buried in Ridgelawn Cemetery in neighboring Clifton.

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