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.
It’s a rare feat to be able to locate the tangible sources of inspirations of poetry. Over at the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler reports on the discovery of the real-life garden tool that inspired William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.”