Modern American Poetry

(^100) Thomas R. Whitaker
recalls Emerson’s statement in “The Poet” about the possibility of using
words with “a terrible simplicity”: “It does not need that a poem should be
long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.”
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens (CEP,277)
The opening assertion of importance is free of gratifying reference to the
speaker as poet or self. The poem’s vitality is no one’s possession but a
possibility for any mind that traces the lines. Line units, stress, quantity,
echoing sounds—are all adjusted to render the delicate movement of
apprehending a “new world.”
As Louis Zukofsky has noted, it takes “only four words to shift the level
at which emotion is held from neatness of surface to comprehension which
includes surface and what is under it.”^5 Each quantitatively long “holding” of
the surface lifts it into esthetic abstraction (“a red wheel,” “glazed with rain,”
“beside the white”). The descent into short, trochaic rendering of
“substance” then gives a more inclusive comprehension, which in turn leads
to a related “surface.” Each pattern refreshes without becoming final; and at
the central climax, the momentary abstraction becomes a metaphorical
transformation, “glazed,” which is followed by a more complex descent. To
add that this poem was “written in 2 minutes”^6 does not diminish its
importance. It testifies to the ability to record at the moment of enlarged and
focused consciousness. Writing as revelation, Williams later said, consists of
“the most complicated formulas worked out ... in a few seconds and set
down” (SE,268f).
The first poem of Spring and All(itself later entitled “Spring and All”)
introduces this new world of present attention by rendering the triumph of
awakening sensibility. From the very beginning its words are charged with
the emergence of life amid the stasis of disease or death: