The Red Wheelbarrow (For Further Study)

For Further Study

• Beaty, Jerome, and William H. Matchett, Poetry: From Statement to Meaning, New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

  The introduction to this book focuses attention onto the overall question of poetry’s goals and how they differ from one poet to the next: the treatment of “The Red Wheelbarrow” that comes later in the book is a little obscure, but provides useful information.

• Drew, Elizabeth, Poetry: A Modern Guide to Its Understanding and Enjoyment, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1959.

  In a chapter entitled “Sound Patterns,” Drew is quite rough on “The Red Wheelbarrow,” stating coolly: “Whether this kind of thing pleases must be a matter of personal taste, but it should not be called ’verse,’ since that word means the rhythm ’turns’ and repeats itself.” This seems to be exactly the kind of thinking Williams was reacting against.

• Pearce, Roy Harvey, “Williams and the ’New Mode,’” William Carlos Williams, edited by J. Hills Miller, Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

  Pearce examines in detail how Williams came to use Imagist techniques. This collection also contains essays about Williams by close associates who are major figures in American poetry themselves, including Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Karl Shapiro, and Robert Lowell.

• Pratt, William, The Imagist Poem, New York: E.P. Dutton Co., 1963.

  An indispensable guide to understanding Imagist poetry. Pratt provides one of the most comprehensive histories of Imagism recorded and dozens of examples, including poems that are not directly related to the movement but fit the pattern.

• Rapp, Carl, William Carlos Williams and Romantic Idealism, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984.

  The style of this book concentrates more on psychology than criticism, which is appropriate for Williams’s method in “The Red Wheelbarrow”: the poet shows an image that made an impression on him, and Rapp, in a well-researched examination, shows why it would be striking.