{"id":6706,"date":"2015-07-22T01:03:22","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T08:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6706"},"modified":"2015-08-15T01:09:18","modified_gmt":"2015-08-15T08:09:18","slug":"owner-of-the-red-wheelbarrow-identified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/07\/22\/owner-of-the-red-wheelbarrow-identified\/","title":{"rendered":"Owner of The Red Wheelbarrow Identified"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The Forgotten Man Behind William Carlos Williams\u2019s \u2018Red Wheelbarrow\u2019<\/h1>\n

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"image from cliparts.co<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

For decades, much has depended on his red wheelbarrow, streaked with rain, next to some white chickens, even if no one has known \u2014 or perhaps even wondered \u2014 exactly who he was.<\/p>\n

But now, the owner of the humble garden tool that inspired William Carlos Williams\u2019s classic poem \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow<\/a>\u201d will finally get his due.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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,\u201d William Logan, the scholar who recently discovered Mr. Marshall\u2019s identity, said in an interview.<\/p>\n

The discovery doesn\u2019t change the meaning, he said, but \u201cknowing there was a man with a particular wheelbarrow and some chickens does help us understand the world the poem was embedded in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams\u2019s 16-word poem, first published in 1923, was hailed as a manifesto of plain-spoken American modernism. Williams himself declared it \u201cquite perfect.\u201d A staple of classrooms and anthologies, it has inspired endless debates about its deeper meaning \u2014 how much of what, exactly, depends on the red wheelbarrow? \u2014 not to mention provided the name of an English-language bookstore in Paris<\/a>, a craft beer<\/a> from Maine and an episode<\/a> of \u201cHomeland.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow,\u201d considers the poem from seemingly every conceivable angle.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at nytimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times The Forgotten Man Behind William Carlos Williams\u2019s \u2018Red Wheelbarrow\u2019 By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER image from cliparts.co For decades, much has depended on his red wheelbarrow, streaked with rain, next to some white chickens, even if no one has known \u2014 or perhaps even wondered \u2014 exactly who he was. But now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}