Childhood Memories

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

Often described as the founder of Imagism, Ezra Pound was both a pioneer of modernist poetry and personal steward to those poets whose work he admired. “In a Station of the Metro” is only two lines of free verse and, like “Childhood Memories” is given to no strict or inherited metrical pattern, allowing only one stressed syllable for every three. However, Pound’s tight control of the sonic qualities of the line are evident: The poem pivots from imagist contemplation of the blurred faces in a subway station to its final and sudden landing of its three ending syllables, each stressed and coming in rapid succession, like knocks on a door. Pound gives the simple image meaning through sound alone. Pound’s landmark work “The Cantos” took over 50 years to write and is roundly considered among the most influential modernist works of the century.

The Fish by Marianne Moore (1918)

Containing a similar imagist gesture, “The Fish” by foundational poet Marianne Moore is another work of modernist meditation leveled on nature. Moore was among the many modernists to have poems published in the magazine William Saphier co-edited, Others. Later, Moore would become editor of her own poetry magazine, Dial, before winning the Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems, which also won the National Book Award. In 1953, Moore won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

“The Fish” works similarly to “Childhood Memories” as a meditation; however, Moore’s style is more technical, making more use of lineation to fold and re-fold, dimension, adding readings into the text. Where Saphier hugs the left column of the physical page space, Moore allows the lines to sprawl, shaping the white space and aesthetic dimension. 

Church Going by Philip Larkin (1954)

Born in England two years after “Childhood Memories” was published, Philip Larkin landed on the other side of modernist anxieties, instead confronting a post-World War II Europe, concerns over the atom bomb, and the further decentering of the world Saphier and his colleagues were only starting to glimpse in 1920. “Church Going” is a technically different machine than Saphier’s poem, but one that arrives at similar questions concerning the tradition of church and clergy in a world that has known the horrors of war and faces the threat of its own destruction.

Ironically, Larkin was a member of “The Movement”: a group of poets working to restore a serious and conservative style—the antithesis of modernism’s radical innovations. In this way, Larkin’s body of work endeavored to expose his audience to objective truths and disillusionment of a postwar world. 

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

By James Wright (1990)

James Wright’s work is a natural accompaniment to William Saphier’s modernist meditation on the Danube. Writing almost a century after Saphier, Wright’s work is like a continuation of “Childhood Memories,” and is often characterized by a haunting imagist gesture of lonely rural vistas. In this selection, Wright derives power (like Saphier) from the simple meditative quality pruned by his insightful lineation and specificity to imagism. In the poem’s final line, Wright’s famous full-stop realization confronts the reader, including them in the speaker’s potent sense of alienation. Wright was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 1972 Collected Poems.