The Centrality of the Image

"The Red Wheelbarrow" is a representative of the Imagist trend in poetry. Famous proponents of Imagism included T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Ezra Pound, with whom Williams was friends. Imagists tended to focus their poetry on using clear, precise language to portray scenes vividly and with little context. Often, Imagist poetry lacks a notable speaker and is devoid of explicit references to human emotion. Instead, the goal is to conjure a particular portrait in the reader's mind using exact language with concrete nouns and verbs rather than abstractions.

"The Red Wheelbarrow" continues the conventions of Imagism by making the representation of a scene—a wet red wheelbarrow next to some chickens—the entire "plot" of the poem. There is little indication that there is a particular speaker, aside from the poem's first lines, "so much depends / upon" (1-2). Here, the image...