[MUSIC] Let's start with a quiz. Fill in the blank. So much depends upon, glazed with rain water, beside the white chickens. Some of you may have guessed a red wheel barrow, if so congratulations. Then again William Carlos Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow, published in 1922, is hard to forget. Indeed it has come to epitomize the kind of modern poetry written in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. In fact, most of the things we associate with modern poetry can be found in Williams' poem. It is written in free verse, it has a structure of four stanzas and alternating three and one word length couplets. But the poem does not rhyme or follow a regular metrical pattern like iambic pentameter. Like a number of modern poems too, it offers an image rather than an idea, it shows rather than tells. Although for some readers I imagine it could stand to tell a good deal more. Williams does not say why so much depends upon such an ordinary object, and we might be left wondering why this sentence counts as a poem at all. That is to say, the poem is difficult, out of the ordinary. Another identifying marker of what we think of as modern poetry. The poem epitomizes modern poetry in another way, though, which is not quite so visible. In 1933, Williams composed a brief note explaining the origins of the poem. The wheelbarrow in question, he wrote, stood outside the window of an old negro's house on a back street in the suburb where I live. It was pouring rain and there were white chickens walking about. The sight impressed me somehow as about the most important, the most integral that it had ever been my pleasure to gaze upon. Later in 1954, Williams recalled that the poem as he put it, sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing. If we take Williams at his word, then the origins of one of the most famous, if not the most famous poem in modern American poetry lies in the poet's encounter with a worker. In all likelihood, too, given the opportunities available to an old Negro in the first half of the 20th century, a worker living in or on the edge of poverty. In these and other poems from the period, Williams wanted to renew readers' contact with the world. He thought the poems could make us see the world differently with new eyes. And he thought that workers and the poor, or the ordinary objects associated with them, could more readily bring about that renewal than any other social class or set of objects. [MUSIC]