Remembering Race:Extra-poetical Contexts and the Racial Other in ?The Red Wheelbarrow?

Abstract

Although once at the center of debates about modern poetry, the canoni? cal status of William Carlos Williams, Red Wheelbarrow, along with the imagist and objectivist practice it represents, now seems beyond dispute. If anything, the poem runs the risk of becoming, as Denise Levertov described it, one of those tiresomely familiar and basically unrevealing anthol? ogy 'specimens' (263). By the same token, the tendency to treat the poem as an specimen owes something to Williams' efforts to remove it from its original context in Spring and All. For despite the intense critical scrutiny the poem has received over the years, very little attention has been paid to what Williams said about it and the different frameworks he provided for it. As if transfixed by its telescopic power, critics see through these frames and, in the process, keep a dark figure in the poems biographical history?Marshall, the red wheelbarrow's African-American owner?at the poem's margins. To my knowledge, Williams only mentions the owner of the wheelbar? row on two occasions. One is in an article, Seventy Years Deep, written for Holiday magazine (1954) and the other appears in an introduction to the poem in an anthology entitled Fifty Poets, An American Auto-Anthology (1933) edited by William Rose Benet. The article Seventy Years Deep is a human-interest story in which Wil? liams presents himself as a poet of the people. The article's subtitle describes him as A physician who is considered by many to be America's greatest living poet . . . [who] attributes his success to what he has learned from the people of his home town?Rutherford, New Jersey (54). Stressing his connection to the community, Williams presents himself through what is, for the most