Between Walls

“The Oven Bird” by Robert Frost (1916)

This is a more traditional Modernist reading of a world that appears edging toward nothingness and how to handle the threat of decline into a world without the possibility of hope. Unlike “Between Walls,” however, Frost cannot bring himself to find the stuff of hope in this 20th-century wasteland. Rather, Frost offers only the grim advice to make the most of a diminished thing, a striking comparison to Williams’s sumptuous embrace of that same diminished world.

“The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams (1923)

Frequently anthologized with “Between Walls,” although the composition dates are separated by more than a decade, this Imagist poem that captures the fleeting moment of white chickens and a rain-spattered wheelbarrow plays out Williams’s painterly fondness for the arresting image. Like the glass bottle and the cinders, the objects in the poet are sublimely happy to stay images despite generations of well-intentioned readers who have imposed often impressive analyses on Williams’s Zen-like lines.

“In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound (1913)

A fragile, delicate couplet crafted by Pound, the philosophical force behind the rise of Imagism, the poem captures a moment in a Paris underground train station with its usual press of eager and hurried passengers that in a single, unexpected moment of impact urged the poet to record it, comparing the faces to petals of a tree.