Originally published without a title, it was designated "XXII" in Williams' 1923 book Spring and All, a hybrid collection which incorporated alternating selections of free verse and prose.
Only 16 words long, "The Red Wheelbarrow" is one of Williams' most frequently anthologized poems, and a prime example of early twentieth-century Imagism.
He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the fish.
[4]In 2015, research identified the man who had inspired the work as Thaddeus Lloyd Marshall Sr., who lived a few blocks away from Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey, and is buried in Ridgelawn Cemetery in neighboring Clifton.
[6] Prior to the revelation about Marshall, some critics and literary analysts believed that the poem was written about one of Williams' patients, a little girl who was seriously ill: This poem is reported to have been inspired by a scene in Passaic, New Jersey, where Williams was attending to a sick young girl.
[10]Orrick Johns' "Blue Under-Shirts Upon a Line"—first published in Others[11] in 1915—may have provided the framework upon which Williams developed "The Red Wheelbarrow".
In his 2010 essay in College Literature,[12] Mark Hama "proposes that what Williams likely recognized in his friend Johns’s poem was the framework for a new modern American poetic line.
"[13] The poet John Hollander cited "The Red Wheelbarrow" as a good example of enjambment to slow down the reader, creating a "meditative" poem.
"[17] Kenneth Lincoln saw humor in the poem, writing "perhaps it adds up to no more than a small comic lesson in the necessity of things in themselves.