Equally likely to be voted top doctor-poet of all time, William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is a famous figure in North American literature. Aside from attending medical school in Pennsylvania from 1902 to 1906, he spent his whole life in Rutherford, New Jersey. This rural township was the setting for his medical and literary practice, the latter including essays, short stories, novels, auto/biography, plays and translations.

Considered an imagist, he was influenced by the surrealist, cubist, futurist and Zen movements in European art between the two world wars. He loved painting, as can be seen in his poem from 1921 ‘Overture for a dance of locomotives’, but chose to use visual imagery in poetry instead. 

He is renowned for saying that ‘Anything is good material for poetry’, and for insisting on ‘No ideas but in things’. With these maxims he created a poetry unique for its local content and speech, its brevity of expression, and its crisp use of image. 

This poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is famous: 

So much depends

upon

 

a red wheel

barrow

 

glazed with

rain

 

beside the white

chickens.

 

 

He was an innovator in poetry for another reason: his rhythm, which he based upon concepts, fragments of speech or reality, and images. Each of these formed a line or a distinct unit in his poems. Rather than creating a strict metre, or beat, and combining it with rhymed words in certain places, as Keats did, Carlos Williams divides his lines into units of meaning, logical pieces from which the poem is built:

 

no defeat is made up entirely of defeat- since

the world it opens is always a place

            formerly

                        unsuspected

 

These lines from ‘Paterson’ show this technique, radical in his day, at work. How does it work in “The Red Wheelbarrow”?

Carlos Williams did not write much about his medical practice: a few vignettes, like Philomena Andronico about a young mother restrained by her charge; and some reflections on the social realities surrounding death as in ‘The last words of my English grandmother’ and ‘Dedication for a plot of ground’. His compassion for people is clear in his work. Here is an excerpt from ‘The raper from Passenack’: 

‘…

I won’t be treated.

 

I refuse. You’ll find me dead in bed

first. Why not? That’s

the way she spoke,

 

I wish I could shoot him. How would

you like to know a murderer?

 

I suppose it’s my mind-the fear of

infection. I’d rather a million times

have been got pregnant.

 

But it’s the foulness of it can’t

be cured. And hatred, hatred of all men

-and disgust

 

…’

 

Consider: What are the ‘poethics’ of writing about the people you live and work with? What are the pitfalls? What is it that depends upon the red wheelbarrow? 

Consider: writing your own poem based on The Red Wheelbarrow. Try using the same introduction, ‘so much depends/ upon’, and the same length, but substituting the images for those of your own: perhaps a piece of medical equipment for the wheelbarrow, and a person for the chicken.

Look at the colours in the original. They seem to be very significant. What other senses could you use in your poem to achieve a similar effect? 

References and further reading 

Selected poems, with an introd. / by R.Jarrell. [N.Y., New Directions, 1963      

Pictures from Brueghel and other poems: collected poems, 1950-1962. / [N.Y.], New Directions           

Paterson. / [N.Y.]. New Directions, [1963?]  

Perloff M (1981 ) The poetics of indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage Ch4 Princeton