During last week’s workshop, professional poet Melanie Goodreaux showed us a new way to look at and analyze poetry. I learned that poetry has very much to do with personal experiences, as when everybody was asked to write a poem, despite the fact that everyone followed the same template, each poem was unique. However, I think that the most important thing I learned was that although the message of the poem may not be inherently obvious, the author’s values and beliefs can be deduced through some analysis of the work, even if it seems very simple. The poem that I chose to review, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, is the epitome of that.

William Carlos Williams was a poet who shook the foundations of American poetry of the 20th century with a style of poetry basically unbeknownst to the world until that point, imagism. Despite the fact that Williams only has a few imagist works, without his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”, it may very well be that not a single imagist anthology can be presented today.

But in order to understand what is so important in this seemingly simple poem, one must realize that imagists were striving to create a clear image in their works. They understood that in order to get readers to understand this clear image, they would need to upend all the emplaced conjectures and ideals of poetry at the time. Imagists like Williams understood that in order to achieve that, they would need to tap into the readers’ memories and values through vivid and detailed descriptions, not specifically of the subject of the poem, but of the scene. This way the reader relies not on what is explicitly told in the poem, but rather on his perception of what he reads, as he creates the image in his mind.
And it is against this background that we should read the “Red Wheelbarrow”.This short and seemingly simple poem exemplifies a gift that Williams had: to create poetry from simple things. Williams could turn a note on the fridge into a deep and insightful poem (which he did in another poem, “This is Just to Say”). For him, “to look” and “to understand” is one whole. When the experience of the poem is not decomposed into what is directly stated but rather what the meaning behind the words is, the poem seems to defy the standards of language, as such a deep message is inscribed exclusively through imagery  in a twelve word poem.