The Red Wheelbarrow (Historical Context)

Historical Context

“An ’image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant in time,” the poet Ezra Pound wrote in a 1913 essay in Poetry magazine. “It is the presentation of such a ’complex’ instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from tome limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.” Pound was one of the founding members of the Imagist school of poetry and had been a classmate of Williams at the University of Pennsylvania, where they formed a lifelong friendship. Imagist poetry was the product of a group of friends who claimed to be Imagists for only a short period of time (1908 to 1917), but the influence of this group has extended to the present day. Although William Carlos Williams mastered different styles of prose and verse in his lifetime, “The Red Wheelbarrow” is considered a perfect ideal of what the Imagists were trying to achieve.

The goal of Imagism was not particularly new. Imagists insisted that poetry should get its power from the feelings that images evoke, not from what the images symbolize or from the poet’s clever style. The focus on a fleeting image can be traced back to Japanese haiku of the sixteenth century, although haiku were almost always about things in nature and written in a strict form, whereas Imagism encouraged writers to be open to form and subject matter. In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ushered in the Romantic Age with their publication of Lyrical Ballads, introducing a new goal for the poet: to capture experience as honestly as possible. The Romantic spirit emphasized the importance of the poet more than Imagism later did, and therefore Romantic poetry used rhyme schemes and rhythms that the Imagist would say distracts from the full impact of the image. The most immediate predecessors to the Imagists were the French Symbolists, including Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Laforge. Symbols, however, are significant because they refer to another idea or object that they represent, and therefore they have to fit into some sort of system in order to have significance: an image speaks for itself.

In 1908, a small group of poets in London who had formed a Poets’ Club found their club dissolving, while at the same time many of the club’s members took to gathering informally at a restaurant. One of the former Poets’ Club members was Ezra Pound. These meetings naturally led to talk of poetry, and out of these talks came a theory of what poetry should do. Comparison of poetry from different cultures finally focused attention on the image as the poem’s central responsibility. T.E. Hulme, who was an unofficial leader, added the idea that no extra words should interfere with the job of presenting an image clearly, which meant, of course, that the poet should not choose his or her words in order to fulfill a rhythm or rhyme scheme. Imagist poems were short and direct. Several of the poets of the group started publishing poems that fit this description. The group’s title itself did not come into use until 1913, when Pound published an essay titled “A Few Do’s and Don’ts by an Imagiste.” The same issue carried an essay by another group member, F.S. Flint, called “Imagisme.” The idea caught on in the poetry community, and in the following months poems that were written in the Imagist style began to show up in magazines. In 1914, one of the Imagist poets, H.D., a mutual friend of Pound and Williams, signed a contract with a major publishing hours to produce annual anthologies of Imagist poetry, and the idea spread even further. By 1917, the group of poets who identified themselves as Imagists had broken up. The shape of all twentieth-century poetry has been changed by the Imagists’ ideas — for example, metered or rhythmic poetry has never recaptured the broad acceptance that it had before, because most writers now see that it is possible to strike an emotional chord quickly, using a cleanly observed slice of reality. On the other hand, after 1917 Imagist poetry became more and more infrequent, as poets went beyond one pure image to weaving a series of images together, or using a powerful image to anchor a wider piece in the way an orchestral piece might center on a single haunting melody as its refrain.

Williams was not part of the group who called themselves Imagists. At the time “The Red Wheelbarrow” was published, he was living in the New Jersey suburb he had been born (and eventually died) in and was a practicing physician. He once explained in an introduction to the poem that he had actually seen the wheelbarrow in a neighbor’s yard: “The sight impressed me somehow as about the most important, the most integral that it had ever been my pleasure to gaze upon.” He did not write this poem trying to be an Imagist, but the logic of Imagism obviously controlled his approach to the subject. To one degree or another, this is how Imagism has affected almost all poets of out century.

Compare & Contrast

• 1923: Soon after President Harding’s sudden death, it was found that his administration was rotten with corruption. Harding’s widow undertook an extensive search to collect and destroy all of his letters, leaving his involvement in the scandals unexamined.

  Today: Critics suggest that intense media scrutiny given to all aspects of the lives of presidential candidates may be discouraging the best people from running from office.

• 1923: Adolf Hitler, a leader of Germany’s National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) political party, lead an overthrow of the Munich city government, for which he was arrested and sent to jail. In this same year, the Soviet Union became a country.

  1924: V.I. Lenin, the chairman of the Soviet Union, died, and was replaced by Josef Stalin, who is thought to be responsible for the murders of up to 30 million Russians before his death in 1953.

  1946-1990: After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a “Cold War” that did not involve actual fighting between the two countries, but they gave support to opposite sides in many smaller conflicts.

  Today: After the breakup of the Soviet Union, America is the world’s only remaining superpower.

• 1923: The first commercial radio manufacturer, Zenith Radio, was founded.

  1950: 9 percent of U.S. households had television sets.

  1965: 95 percent of U.S. households had television sets.

  Today: The number of households that have Internet access is increasing at a rate too quick to be accurately counted.