William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams once said, “If they give you lined paper, write the other way” (“All About William Carlos Williams”). Williams was bold, creative, and brilliant. He felt that the traditional writing techniques were overused and too mainstream, and he wanted to individualize modern poetry. He wrote many unique pieces, but his most well known is, “The Red Wheelbarrow”. William Carlos Williams grew up in an affluent home during the Era of Modernism, which allowed him to write “The Red Wheelbarrow” a poem that shows the opposing distinction between the painful real world and the beauty of nature.
William Carlos Williams grew up living a prosperous lifestyle, which helped him to become a revolutionary figure during the Modernist movement.

Unfortunately, Williams grew up with ridiculously high expectations from his parents, which sometimes pushed him over the edge. (“William Carlos Williams: A Brief Biography”) Williams himself said, “terror dominated my youth, not fear.” (“William Carlos Williams”) His parents instilled academic and moral perfection upon him, and Williams was terrified to let his biggest role models down. After high school, Williams attended The University of Pennsylvania to study medicine. He enjoyed learning about the study of medicine, but had trouble concentrating on it. Williams wanted to quit and focus on his true passion, writing, but other factors kept him from doing so. The money involved in the field of medicine was what kept him going, Williams knew if he wanted to keep living the life he was accustomed to, then he must stay in school. While in college, Williams befriended poet Ezra Pound, who influenced many of Williams’s future works. In 1906, Williams graduated with a medical degree, and in 1910 opened a practitioner's office. Some say that his inspiration for his poems came from his patients themselves. Williams lived two lives: by day he was a hardworking doctor, and by night he was an

Due to its simplicity and extensive use of imagery, “The Red Wheelbarrow” is both loved and hated by its readers. “The Red Wheelbarrow” is eight lines in length, and contains only sixteen words total (“William Carlos Williams”). It's use of diction is exquisite and hand-picked, causing each individual word to create an image in the reader's mind. The poem’s form also contributes to its meaning, each stanza is created in resemblance of a wheelbarrow. Imagism is the main writing technique that William Carlos Williams used. In "The Red Wheelbarrow" Williams writing creates an image of a farm scene in ones mind. He tries to give each word a meaning, and by doing so, he compares the delicate farm scene to the harsh reality of the actual world. "The Red Wheelbarrow" is written in a free verse style, and there is no punctuation throughout the entire poem. Robert Warren and critic Cleanth Brooks said in their book, Understanding Poetry, that “reading this poem [The Red Wheelbarrow] is like peering at an ordinary object through a pin prick in a piece of cardboard. The fact that the tiny hole arbitrarily frames the object endows it with an exciting freshness that seems to hover on the verge of revelation” (“All About William Carlos Williams”). Warren and Brooks believed that the poem was a gift for modern literature, it was a prime example of imagism and individualism.