On a first reading, the immediate striking quality of William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” is the poet’s sparse and hyper-minimalistic style. The entire poem consists of four stanzas, each numbering only two lines, and each stanza containing only four words. This minimalism, however, seems appropriate considering the subject matter: Williams is portraying a simple wheel barrow, entirely dedicating the poem to its description. Accordingly, the minimalist approach by the poet can be said to mirror the simplicity and sparseness of the wheel barrow as an object.

But this would seem to only capture one dimension of the poem. For Williams seems to be saying that simplicity and minimalism does not, by definition, exclude importance or significance. This is made clear in the very first two lines of the poem, Williams thus immediately establishes this notion and thereby orients the reader as to how to approach the remainder of the poem: “so much depends/upon”, then moving to the poem’s object in the next stanza “a red wheel barrow.”

The trivial and banal wheel barrow is suddenly transformed into a significant actor in our lives. The setting of this poem is a rural location: the red wheel barrow “glazed with rain/water/beside the white/chickens” at the same time evokes imagery of perhaps how the rural and the agricultural are the foundations of our society, images which we perhaps neglect, especially in a modern society, where, for example, our food products are safely produced outside of our view. Williams wants to call attention to the miniscule, the neglected objects in our lives, which at the same time play a profound role in our lives.

The style, accordingly, fits it in with this motif, as to the extent that simple objects can possess enormous power and influence, so too can simple, minimalistic verse impress this same power upon the reader. Williams’ style here is appropriate to the banality of the wheel barrow as an object: his style seeks to mirror the simplicity of its object, while amplifying its importance. Ahearn (), however, reads this differently. He believes that there is a contrast at work here between “the universal and age-old scene depicted in the poem and the radically new free verse form in which it exists.” (p. 5) I would beg to differ with this conclusion: there would be a certain absurdity if Williams treated such an object with the grandeur of an epic or classical style.

Rather, this minimalistic style allows Williams to capture forgotten, minority objects in our lives, which exert a tremendous impact on how we live our lives. Williams’ style, in other words, permits us to see what is not noticed, not through excessive or over-top language, but the opposite: by stripping away language to reveal the essentials he mirrors a stripping away of all the phenomena and clutter of our daily lives to show how the apparently insignificant is, in fact, significant.