Williams’ spare poem brings together two apparently incongruous literary traditions of his time: Romanticism and Imagism. An example of Romanticism is Walt Whitman’s liberating free verse and his perspective of the world as a spiritual plane of expression. Imagism, an early 20th-century movement founded by Williams’ lifelong friend and mentor Ezra Pound, was inspired by innovations in photography. This movement celebrated the direct presentation of images in measured poetic lines free of the self-indulgent verbiage that defined much British and American public poetry at the turn of the century.

Pound expounded at length about the poet’s responsibility to present the image without commentary, imported wisdom, or layers of themes; Williams’ himself famously argued, “No ideas but in things.” Nothing belonged in the poem save the image the poet shared. Given the weight of poetic traditions that long elevated the poet to a central position in the poem, this was a revolutionary concept. The thing, not a symbol but a thing, centers a poem. “The Red Wheelbarrow” then takes Whitman’s delight in the world all around the poet, the sense of how that world was charged with a spiritual intensity that transcended its otherwise pedestrian shapes and colors, but expresses that delight with restraint.