Between Walls

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1938

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

This is a Depression era poem. Although it makes no specific reference to that socio-economic context nor offers the now-familiar images of long breadlines, the desolate faces of the unemployed now without homes, or grim streets of shuttered shops, the poem is of its era. It offers a tender hope to an America reeling in its own failure, uncertain of its future. Ever the doctor, Williams refuses to accept anything but faith in recovery.

First published in 1938, “Between Walls” is both a part of its historical context and defiantly, gloriously apart from it. Although such speculation can be inexact, Williams most likely drafted the poem during the darkest moments in America’s nearly decade-long economic catastrophe, a national calamity of such proportions that it traumatized an entire generation struggling to come to terms with the sudden end to the premise of prosperity and to the giddy faith in the American Dream.

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To an America ailing, Williams, the doctor, prescribes all he can offer: those moments, stolen from this otherwise barren and forbidding reality, when unexpectedly an entirely random collection of objects strewn about carelessly for reasons the poet cannot entirely explain speaks to the imagination, fires it up in a moment akin to an epiphany, entirely unearned, entirely unexpected. That intellectual/intuitive/creative muscle is all one has and thus, in a ruined world of limited hopes, it is everything that its historical context cannot challenge. That sense of casual beauty cannot be depreciated even by an economy in ruins. Those shattered bits of green glass that glint in the alley are bits of hope in a dark time. They alone are what Doctor Williams prescribes to a nation fearing its health and yearning for recovery.

Literary Context

Williams’s spare poem, at once joyous and austere, subjective and objective, brings together two apparently incongruous literary traditions of his time: the great grasping bear-hug vision of the world as a spiritual plane of expression, as defined in Walt Whitman’s deliberately excessive, raucous, frenetic, and liberating free verse, and the precise, careful, Zen-like quiet defined by Imagism. Imagism is the early-20th-century movement inspired by innovations in photography. Its philosophical argument came in large part from Williams’s lifelong friend and mentor Ezra Pound. Imagism celebrates the direct presentation of images in carefully measured poetic lines that are themselves deliberately freed of the ornate literariness and self-indulgent verbiage that had 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 cleanly, directly. No commentary, no imported wisdom, no 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 had long elevated the poet to a central position in the poem, this was a radical, even revolutionary concept. The thing, not a symbol but a thing, centers a poem. “Between Walls” then takes Whitman’s “shameless,” giddy 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 in tight, restrained lines that whisper rather than yawp, suggest rather than insist, and shine rather than illuminate.