Romanticism In The Red Wheelbarrow

In the twentieth century, American poetry seemed to stagnate as the romantic genre appeared drained. Wolfgang Karrer explains poets avid to relay a different and powerful message to the American society could thus either rally the “renaissance” movement which attempted to reinvent new forms of poetry revitalizing older poetry styles or “remain with the domestic or local color realism” (130). Claude McKay decided to opt for the latest and will often use Black music and dance as a framework to express his racial message. Williams Carlos Williams opted to join a niche and controversial poetry trend, the imagism, which seeks to reject the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry, through the directness of presentation …show more content…
This very short poem is indeed only composed of four two lines stanzas with three words on the first line and only one word on the second line. According to James Green, the lyrics of the poem are presented one after the other in short lines to ”slow the reading and focus the reader’s attention on each bit of information in a sequence that suspends completion of the scene until the very last word”. This suspension moment James Green is referring is indeed created by the enjambement technique: in each stanza, the reader is briefly interrupted at the end of the first line impatiently awaiting to read the second line of the stanza to finally discover and comprehend the rest of the message. This technique allows to effectively build intensity in the poem honoring the hero of this poem, the …show more content…
The imagery is deprived of figurative language, and the words are bereft of unnecessary or complicated adjectives. William provides only the elementary and vital description of the wheelbarrow. It is “red” covered with shiny “water”, which makes the wheelbarrow dazzle and stand out. Green indicates this technique is characteristic of the writers part of the imagism movement like Williams, who seeks to isolate a single image to reveal its essence. The absence of qualitative to describe the wheelbarrow indeed helps the reader to imagine a very specific picture of the wheelbarrow, like the one from a painting. Thus, a wheelbarrow suddenly becomes “the” wheelbarrow, transformed from an usual object into a special tool. This simplistic form of poetry reflects the mundane aspect of wheelbarrows, but also allows Williams to let the wheelbarrow