New Context for 'The Red Wheelbarrow' in the Form of Neighbor Thaddeus Marshall

Jennifer Schuessler writes for the New York Times about a little-known poet we like to call William Carlos Williams. Actually, she'd like to write about someone else--Mr. Thaddeus Marshall. "[T]he owner of the humble garden tool that inspired William Carlos Williams’s classic poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow' will finally get his due," says Schuessler.

On July 18, in a moment of belated poetic justice, a stone will be laid on the otherwise unmarked grave of Thaddeus Marshall, an African-American street vendor from Rutherford, N.J., noting his unsung contribution to American literature.

“When we read this poem in an anthology, we tend not to think of the chickens as real chickens, but as platonic chickens, some ideal thing,” William Logan, the scholar who recently discovered Mr. Marshall’s identity, said in an interview.

The discovery doesn’t change the meaning, he said, but “knowing there was a man with a particular wheelbarrow and some chickens does help us understand the world the poem was embedded in.”

Williams’s 16-word poem, first published in 1923, was hailed as a manifesto of plain-spoken American modernism. Williams himself declared it “quite perfect.” A staple of classrooms and anthologies, it has inspired endless debates about its deeper meaning — how much of what, exactly, depends on the red wheelbarrow? — not to mention provided the name of an English-language bookstore in Paris, a craft beer from Maine and an episode of “Homeland.”

But Mr. Logan, a professor at the University of Florida who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review, may have taken the poem’s fullest measure yet. His roughly 10,000-word essay on the poem, published in the most recent issue of the literary journal Parnassus and titled simply “The Red Wheelbarrow,” considers the poem from seemingly every conceivable angle.

There are discussions of Williams’s aesthetic influences and composition habits. (Williams, a medical doctor by profession, sometimes wrote poems on prescription forms.) Mr. Logan also considers the history of hyphenation in the word “rainwater,” previous literary references to painted wheelbarrows, New Jersey ordinances concerning handcarts, and early-20th-century poultry trends.

“Who knew there was a fad for white chickens?” he said.

His most notable detective work, however, concerns Mr. Marshall, about whom Williams offered some clues but never fully identified.

Find out more about Mr. Marshall at the NYT. Photo at top: "Thaddeus Marshall, the owner of the most famous red wheelbarrow in literary history." Credit Teresa Marshall Hale. Courtesy Mark Giordano, and the New York Times.