In a Station of the Metro
In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound 1916
Based on Japanese haiku, “In a Station of the Metro” (1916) reflects Pound’s interest in other cultures, as well as his belief that the purpose of art was to “make it new.” This poem is the embodiment of Pound’s theory of Imagism, which prescribed:
- Direct treatment of the thing itself.
- Use no word that is not relevant to the presentation.
- To use rhythm in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the metronome.
Pound was not interested in faceting a perfect jewel of an image, but rather in extricating from the center of human experience a concentrated image, as if sculpting it out of stone. In fact, Pound learned more from the Russian painter Kandinsky’s theory of form and color, and the French sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska’s work, than from conventional study of poetry. Indeed, what he termed his “metro emotion” only began to make sense to him wordlessly, as “an equation,” “little splotches of color,” and “a pattern.” It was not the multitudinous detail of human experience that concerned him, but the emotional structure of the experience in poetic terms. He has written of this poem that
I got out of a metro train ... and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another ... and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion.
Pound’s determination that “the image is itself the speech,” ultimately led him to the “one-image
poem” of the haiku, which superimposes one idea on another, elucidating both. On the evening of the Metro experience Pound says that he went home and wrote a thirty-line poem, but destroyed it because it merely described the incident. Half a year later he wrote a poem of 15 lines. Finally, a year afterward, Pound composed the “[haiku]-like sentence” of the poem which is the poetic ideal for his theory of Imagism.
Author Biography
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, and raised in Philadelphia, the son of Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston Pound. He made his first visits to Europe with his family in 1898 and 1902. He attended the Cheltenham Military Academy when he was twelve and soon after attended the Cheltenham Township High School. Just before his sixteenth birthday Pound entered the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1903 he transferred to Hamilton College, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1905. He taught Romance languages at Wabash College in Indiana for a short time in 1907, but was dismissed after a scandal involving a stranded actress that he allowed to stay overnight with him in his room. After this and a failed courtship with Mary S. Moore, Pound decided to leave for Europe, where he privately published his first volume of poetry, A lume spento, in Venice in 1908. He then moved to London and by 1911 was immersed in the literary and intellectual milieu and was a respected critic and poet. Around this time Pound founded a poetic movement called Imagism, which linked techniques derived from the Symbolist movement and Oriental poetry, such as haiku.
Pound spent much of his time concerned with promoting the careers of many of the great writers of the time and was a key figure in the publication of many influential works, including Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In 1921 Pound moved to Paris and from there to Rapallo, Italy, in 1924. In Italy Pound endorsed the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini and declared his political and anti-semitic beliefs in a series of radio broadcasts during World War II. After the war Pound was arrested by American allies and charged with treason. He was found mentally incapable to stand trial and was committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C. in 1946. Upon his release in 1958 he returned to Italy. He died in Venice in 1972 and is buried in San Michele Cemetery on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
Poem Text
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Poem Summary
Lines 1-2
In such a compressed poem as this haiku it may be useful to refer to the title itself almost as a line in the poem. On a very literal level, then, it is clear that Pound is placing the event that the poem presents within the context of the Paris Metro or train system. Figuratively, however, “In a Station of the Metro” may call up an association with “stations of the cross,” which are “a series of 14 representations of successive incidents of the Passion of Christ ... visited in sequence for prayer or meditation.” This association establishes the state of mind necessary for concentration on the compressed image presented by the poet in this haiku.
In line 1 “apparition” is the first word that directs the reading of the poem, and the only abstract word in these two lines. Not only does it have more syllables than any other word in the poem, but it functions in all three of its definitions. “Apparition” is initially defined as “a ghostly appearance of a person or thing,” and as such sets the tone for a spiritual or meditative experience. The second meaning of the word is “something making a remarkable or incongruous appearance”—and it certainly is incongruous to find a nature image in a train station. It is equally incongruous to find there the kind of aesthetic or spiritual experience that the poem explores. Finally, “apparition” is defined as “an act of becoming visible; appearance.” In fact, the poem itself renders the poet’s image-centered meditation visible on the page for the reader.
The last part of the line, “these faces in the crowd,” seems to be without much poetic significance until the second line is read, lacking “phanopoeia” (as Pound termed visual image). Nevertheless, combined with “The apparition of it achieves the power of phanopoeia; the reference is clearly to the phenomenon that has occurred as some faces in the crowd in the train station become distinct and separate. This might be akin to the phenomenon of “not seeing the forest for the trees,” but in reverse, as the crowd disintegrates and people with individual faces become distinguishable.
The 12 syllables of this line illustrate Pound’s concept of the sound and rhythm of “melopoeia.” He sets a mood of focused anticipation here by using the sounds of the syllables to break the line into three balanced phrases of 5, 4, and 3 syllables respectively. They are “balanced” because it is not the syllables themselves which determine the length of the phrase, but the sounds of the syllables: “The apparition [PAUSE] of these faces [PAUSE] in the crowd;”
There is more poetic appeal in the second line of the haiku. It presents an enchanting image of blossoms that have blown loose and stuck by the rain to the black bark of the tree branch.
In such a short poem, any use the poet makes of sound can serve as a technique for structuring the poem. The first obvious sound connection between line 1 and line 2 is the assonance of the internal vowel sounds between “crowd” and “bough” at the ends of the lines. The prepositional phrase “in the crowd” becomes balanced in the second line with “on a ... bough.”
Further connection between the two lines occurs by the use of alliteration in the “p” sounds of “apparition” and “[p]etals.” In addition, the second line’s musical quality is accentuated by the assonance of the “e” sound in “[p]etals” and “wet,” as well as by the alliteration of the “b” sounds in “black” and “bough.”
Pound’s sense of “melopoeia” (sound and rhythm in poetry) comprises the more conventional poetic concepts of assonance and alliteration, but extends further to the use of the sounds and lengths of syllables and punctuation to create rhythm in the line. This second shorter line of 7 syllables has a more complex rhythm than that of the balanced 3-phrase first line of 12 syllables. The first phrase of this second line is made up of the 2 syllables of “[p]etals,” the second of the 3 quicker syllables of “on a wet.” The final two beats of the phrase “black bough” are given their weight by the pause of the comma preceding them.
It has often been suggested that haiku can be rendered more easily comprehensible by inserting the phrase “is like” between the two lines. This, however, creates merely a simile, or comparison of “faces in the crowd” with “[p]etals on a ... bough.” While this is indeed lovely, in fact the two lines put in place here set a metaphorical process into effect.
Metaphor is a more intense rendering of the relationship of “likeness” than is simile. By omitting the use of the words “like” or “as,” metaphor creates an identification between two things. It is helped to do this in these two lines by means of the semicolon, which leads a reader to expect a balanced grammatical construction. However, the relationship established in the poem is between more than “these faces in the crowd” and the “[p]etals on a wet, black bough.” In fact, it is not “faces” that are like”[p]etals,” but it is “[t]he apparition” which is like something.
A semicolon generally signals an equation, or balance, between two grammatical structures. And, in much the same way that a sentence can have an understood subject in a command that begins with a verb (EXAMPLE: [You] Leave your dog outside.), these two lines balanced by the semicolon suggest an understood equation of “[t]he apparition of’ in the first line with, perhaps, “[the appearance of]” in the second line.
While it is necessary to use the first line of the haiku to discover the implied grammatical structure of the second line, it is also critical to further explore the image of the first line to inform that of the second line. Perhaps it is best to begin with the literal sense of what is presented in the first line: a busy train station, a crowd of people moving onto the train and/or a crowd of people moving off the train, a rush of movement and energy—certain faces become visible (the third meaning of “apparition”) in the crowd.
This literal analysis of the first line leads to a similar examination of the second. Thus, through our expectation of balanced grammatical structures implied by the semicolon, a balance in the content of the images is achieved. This means that it is necessary to consider how the blossoms on the bough came to be there. First they were in flowerets, then there was a spring shower, and then the wind blew them free until they landed, stuck by the damp of the rain to the dark tree bark. Thus, one might say,
The apparition of these faces in the crowd [IS EQUAL TO] the appearance of petals on a wet, black bough.
In order to comprehend fully what the above metaphor, or identification, or equation really means, it is important to understand the traditional function of haiku as a means for the presentation of a nature image. Pound used this poetic form with full knowledge of its history and tradition, and as a human being and artist living in the Modernist era he was also aware of the developing sense in the early twentieth century that human life is almost necessarily isolated from nature. Because of this, it might seem that the equation in his haiku of a typically lovely and poetic nature image with such an image of human life in the Modernist era as a train station in a busy metropolitan city is interesting merely because it is incongruous.
In fact Pound’s meditation on his aesthetic or spiritual response to the perception of beauty in such an unexpected place engendered the poetic struggle toward the knowledge that “these faces are the same as the petals; the apparition of these faces in the crowd occurs by the same force of nature as the appearance of the petals on the tree bough.”
Themes
Appearance vs. Reality
The use of the word “apparition” in the first line is what opens this poem up, extending its reach beyond that of a simple comparison of faces to petals, blurring the lines of reality. We use this word often to describe something that cannot be confirmed to be real, such as a ghost. Although it
Topics for Further Study
- Write the story of how this poem came to Pound. Was he standing on a subway platform? Was he at his desk? On a ferris wheel? Did he shout it out? Did he rewrite it a hundred times until he got it right?
- Compare this poem with Matsuo Bashõ’s haiku “Falling Upon Earth,” also included in Poetry for Students. What common attitude do these authors share? Does the strict haiku form help or hinder Bashõ in getting his point across?
- How do you think the speaker of “In a Station of the Metro” feels about the train? How does he feel about the people who ride it? Explain.
is similar in meaning to the word “appearance,” the fact that the poet has chosen to use this variation tells us a lot about the mood that he is trying to set: “appearance” indicates more uncertainty, as if a speaker is not sure whether he saw a thing or not, while “apparition” raises the idea that the speaker distrusts the idea of reality altogether. The relationship between the faces and the petals is brought into question in this poem. We cannot say that the flower petals “symbolize” the faces because that word implies that one thing takes the place of another, and since faces on train platforms are common sights there would be no reason to provide a substitute for them. The poem does not say the faces “are like” petals, so it is not a simile: the two things have too little in common to say that they speak metaphorically of each other. It seems almost foolish to mention it, but Pound of course did not mean this poem to be taken literally, as if the speaker had hallucinated flower petals while looking at people. Throughout his life, Pound was concerned with the way that things represent other things and the meaning that is derived from putting them together. If the word “apparition” makes us uncertain about his idea of how the faces and the petals fit together, that is because any two things create a new reality when they are united.
Nature
Pointing out the fact that a completely urban experience such as the rush of people stepping off a train is like a natural occurrence is a way of telling the reader that the industrialized world is not entirely separated from the natural world. We can feel comforted by the positive association of faces with flower petals, which are usually used to represent nature’s most beautiful creations. That comfort, however, is short lived when we realize that the petals are connected to something as heavy and ugly as “a wet, black bough.” What the poem leaves unstated is exactly which part of man’s world is like the bough. It can only be the setting, the metro station. We are led to see the experience of riding the train as somehow being a “wet” experience. Commuting on crowded subway trains can certainly soak one with the oppressive need to follow particular social behaviors and weigh on the soul as much as water weighs down wood. Being an anonymous part of a dense crowd is a very dark existence, so the blackness of the wood is appropriate. Pound touches upon feelings in this poem that seem to be unique to the harshness of modern life, and he tells us that even the most human of activities are part of nature taking its course.
Consciousness
By being so abrupt in shifting from the first image to the second, Pound is letting the reader experience the realization that these people are like flowers in the way that he experienced it. This immediate connection between two things that seem to have nothing in common is a good imitation of how the preconscious mind works. If one takes the time to think about it, the people at the train station actually have little or nothing to do with flower petals. We can analyze their relationship after the fact and come up with a dozen things that the two have in common, but upon first experiencing the poem it is over with too quickly for analysis. The short form that Pound uses is a way of striking his reader with a sharp, vivid image before the conscious mind has time to react: we feel the connection between the two situations immediately, and by the time we get around to thinking about it, it is too late—the poem has already worked its magic. To many readers who are used to poems that inspire ideas, “In A Station of the Metro” often seems to be incomplete, as Japanese haiku often does. The strangeness does not come entirely from the poem’s brief length (although it certainly does not look like the poems that we are accustomed to), rather it is the lack of ideas that makes it seem as if the poet has not fulfilled his duty. Pound purposely frustrates readers who are looking to the poem for something to think about (as students are often taught to do), but he succeeds in getting readers to feel something that goes beyond thought.
Style
“In a Station of the Metro” is a type of poem called a haiku (sometimes spelled “hokku”) a traditional Japanese nature-image poem of precisely 17 syllables. Pound’s haiku has 19 syllables, 12 in the first line and 7 in the last. The haiku as Pound uses the form sets a typically Modernist image of the city in relationship to an image from nature.
Image is central to this form, and Pound’s concept of “phanopoeia,” or the casting of images on the imagination, is certainly at the center of this poem. However, his belief that literature is language charged to the highest degree also includes the concepts of “logopoeia,” the play of the mind among ideas, and “melopoeia,” emotional correlations induced by the sound and rhythm of words.
The compression of meaning in this poem into such highly concentrated images limits the play of ideas necessary for “logopoeia,” but the emphasis in haiku on syllables ensures that “melopoeia” will be used to the fullest possible extent. Pound maintained that syllables are the medium with which the poet “cuts a design in time.” The sharpness and subtlety of the design, its rhythm, will be determined by the sounds of those syllables. For example, in the 12 syllables of the first line of the haiku, the consonant sounds are mostly soft, shushing, and sibilant, and serve to extend the vowels in three wavelike motions between them: “The apparition [PAUSE] of these faces [PAUSE] in the crowd ...” Contrast this with the 7 syllables of the second line, in which the movement is quicker—until the comma pause and the syllables of the words “black bough” slow the rhythm. The full line almost mimics the action of the petals themselves dropping, then sticking on the tree branch.
Historical Context
With its concrete description, its directness and attention to the physical, this poem stands as a prime example of the Imagist school of poetry, of which
Compare & Contrast
- 1916: Although the war in Europe (now called World War I) had been going on since 1914 and Germany had threatened to use submarines to sink U.S. merchant ships, President Woodrow Wilson was reelected with the slogan “He kept us out of war.”
1917: America’s entry into the war helped bring it to an end the following year.
1941: America stayed out of the war in Europe until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7. The U. S. declaration of war against Japan brought declarations of war from Japan’s allies, Italy and Germany.
1946: With the disabling of Germany during the war, the United States turned its military attention to the threat of Communism from the Soviet Union.
1991: The Soviet Union disbanded when member countries rushed to declare independence.
Today: The United States is the only military superpower in the world.
- 1905: Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity, which guessed that gravitational, accelerational, and magnetic forces are actually all part of one system.
1945: Using principles derived from Einstein’s theory, scientists working for the U. S. government detonated the first nuclear-fission explosion, which was used later that year as a bomb against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today: Approximately 20 percent of the energy consumed in the U.S. is provided by nuclear power.
- 1916: The first commercial refrigerator became available in the United States, but it cost $900, about the price of a new car.
Today: Only one home in five thousand does not have refrigeration.
Pound was a founding member. In the early years of his career, after graduating from college in 1906, Pound was interested in the works of symbolist and decadent poets such as Swinburne, Rossetti, Johnson, Symons, and Yeats because they took a more personal, subjective approach to poetry than the writers who came before them. He admired their work, but thought that it was too self-absorbed to communicate with people the way he thought poetry should. On the other hand, the symbolists were rebelling against the Victorian writers whose ideas, he felt, were too broad and too moralistic, diluting their impact by trying to have a message for everybody. Pound was dissatisfied with both extremes. In 1908 he met T. E. Hulme in London and was introduced to Hulme’s friends, former members of a Poet’s Club at Oxford who had quit the club but still gathered regularly at a London pub. The talk naturally centered on what was good poetry and what was bad, and Pound, naturally, was interested. After poetry from different cultures was compared, it was decided that poems should be short and direct, focused on a single image, and more concerned with the musical sound of the poem than with fitting it into a conventional rhyme scheme. Within the next few years, several members of the group had poems published that followed the style that had been discussed.
Pound himself coined the name “Imagist” several years later, in 1912. In his book of poetry titled Riposte, he included a section of poems called “The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme,” naming the group for the first time in his introduction: “As for the future, les Imagistes, the descendants of that forgotten school of 1909, have that in the keeping.” In 1913, in an essay in Poetry magazine titled “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist,” Pound described just what was meant by “image”: “An ‘image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant in time. It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation, that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.” The idea of Imagism, which had begun in 1909, was starting to gel into a real school at that time. More and more poets were calling their works Imagism, while the definition of what an Imagist actually was still had to be decided. In his 1954 book Literary Essays, Pound recalled sitting down with the poets “H. D.” and Richard Aldington at about the time of the Poetry essay and coming up wit three rules: treat the thing, whatever it is, directly; use no words that do not contribute to the overall effect; and compose for a sound like music, not just rhythm. To those who are familiar with twentieth-century poetry, these “rules” seem tame if not obvious, but that is only an indication of the strong impact Imagism has had.
For all of the influence that Imagist writing had on its own generation and for generations to come, it was short-lived, so that by 1917 hardly anyone called themselves an Imagist. Part of the problem was that it had grown too popular, too quickly: the idea was to be shockingly original and honest, but it only took a few years before everyone in the world of poetry was referring to every sort of poem as Imagist. It did not help that Pound felt the credit for the idea stolen away from him. In 1915, a newcomer to the movement, Amy Lowell, signed a contract with a large commercial publishing house to put out an annual anthology of imagist poetry: the advertisements for the book listed Lowell as “the foremost member of the Imagists” and merely mentioned Ezra Pound’s name along with the other members. After that, Pound referred to the movement as “Amyism” and refused to be associated with it. He could not simply cut himself off from the way of thinking that the group represented, though, and his writing continued to be guided by the artistic principle of focusing on the image and not the poem’s form. Much of modern poetry holds this as one of the most important considerations that the poet has, although it is not the only consideration. Imagism has become absorbed into the mainstream.
Critical Overview
American poet Allen Ginsberg has said that Pound was the most important poet of his time, the one poet since Walt Whitman to develop the possibility for a new practice of writing and reading poetry. As Donald E. Stanford indicates, Pound’s search for poetic structures through which to understand his emotional experience led him to discard the structures of logic practiced since the Middle Ages. In place of this he formulated a structure based on juxtaposition of images and ideas; this grounded his theory of Imagism.
Pound felt that Chinese poetry corroborated his “Imagist” principles, although the critic William Van O’Connor senses that Pound’s focus on “Imagism” might have been distorted by his attention to Chinese poetry. There are some who would agree, who see “In a Station of the Metro” as a minor poem, an instance of Pound showing off his sketchy and obscure knowledge of other cultures and literatures. Nevertheless, it is Michael Alexander’s critical opinion that this poem is more than an experiment with the form of haiku: it centers Pound’s entire life’s work.
Pound began to write free verse after he had experimented at great length with set forms of poetry in English. These use meter and rhyme to aid in what Michael Tucker calls the “memorability” necessary for poetry before the printing press and the easy availability of books. The “set form” of haiku, however, lends itself to Pound’s principle of “direct treatment of the thing itself’ which, Tucker suggests, “insists ... on the freedom to select the word that most exactly designates the thing,” whereas the use of meter promotes the inclusion of irrelevant words and the use of rhyme ensures only that the selected word will always rhyme with another. Tucker points out that Pound’s refusal to express emotional experience in the rhyme and meter of set forms would seem to indicate that he would then be writing prose, not poetry. However, his further rejection of what Tucker refers to as “words of secondary importance” necessary for the logical construction of sentences focused him on the image-making potential of words and lines similar to that of haiku. In fact, Tucker employs haiku to clarify Pound’s work in this direction. It is Tucker’s belief that when we insert, for example, the phrase “is like” between the two images of a haiku—to make their relationship explicit—we rob it of the power to communicate in a direct emotional way. In fact, the power of Imagism is nowhere so evident as in Pound’s haiku-poem.
Pound’s “[haiku]-like sentence” established the artistic ideal of Imagism. While this movement extended over a mere ten years, it was responsible for a transformation in poetry and fiction in English, noted by English novelist and critic Virginia Woolf as the change in human nature that was the beginning of Modernism. In Pound’s work, as William Pratt has recognized, this manifested itself in his ability to construct images with words and in his unfailing ear for the poetic rhythm of conversational speech. Both are characteristic of this radical shift and of “In a Station of the Metro,” the poem that confirmed a new understanding of poetry for the twentieth century.
Criticism
Marisa Pagnattaro
Marisa Pagnattaro is a freelance writer and is the Book Review Editor and an Editorial Board Member of the Georgia Bar Journal. She is a teaching assistant at the University of Georgia, Athens. In the following essay, Pagnattaro discusses how Pound employed the philosophy oflmagism to create “In a Station of the Metro.”
Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” is the quintessential example of an early twentieth-century literary movement known as Imagism. To appreciate this poem, it is helpful to understand the background that led to its very succinct formation. Pound created the term Imagism to describe a new kind of poetry that broke away from nineteenth-century poetic conventions, which included ornate diction and traditional verse forms. According to Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era, Imagism, or “‘Imagisme’(in pseudo French) was a name coined to describe the quality of [Hilda Doolittle’s] verse.” Kenner noted Pound’s famous 1912 meeting with Doolittle in a British Museum tea room were Pound “with a slashing pencil made excisions” on one of Doolittle’s poems, scrawling “H. D. Imagiste” at the bottom of the page before sending it off for publication. In his cover letter to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry (the magazine that was to publish Doolittles’s poem), Pound promoted this new style of verse by exclaiming: “Objective—no slither—direct—no excess of adjectives, etc.... It’s straight talk.” With these passing comments, Imagism came into being.
The main idea of Imagism is to use clearly presented, concise images in free verse. In the March 1913 issue of Poetry, Pound set forth the basic tenets of Imagism: I. direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective; II. to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation; and III. in regard to rhythm, to compose in sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. Pound sought to capture a pure image, or what he described as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”
Using this philosophy of poetry composition, Pound set out to write “In a Station of the Metro.” In Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, Pound explains the biographical basis of the poem:
Three years ago in Paris I got out of a “metro” train
at La Concorde, and suddenly saw a beautiful face,
then another, and another, and then a beautiful child’s
face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried
all day to find words for what this had meant to me,
and I could not find any words that seemed to me
worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that
evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard,
I was still trying and found, suddenly, the expression.
I do not mean that I found in words, but there came
an equation ... not in speech, but in little splotches
of colour. It was just mat—a “pattern” you mean
something with a “repeat” in it. But it was a word,
the beginning, for me of a language in colour.
Comparing this process of writing poetry to the art and writings of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, Pound stated that it seemed quite natural to him that “an artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God,” which was the focus of many previous poets. In other words, Pound took great pleasure in experimenting with the juxtaposition of words to create a single image. Pound elaborated on this idea of a “one image poem” by describing it as “a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea on top of another.”
“In a Station of the Metro” is such a single-image poem. Pound initially wrote a thirty-line poem about his experience at the metro, but destroyed it as what he called a work of “second intensity.” Six months later, he reduced the poem in half, but was still not satisfied. In his 1913 article entitled “How I Began,” Pound describes a sudden realization that followed an inability to write the poem for several weeks: “Then only the other night, wondering how I should tell the adventure, it struck me that in Japan, a work of art is not estimated by its acreage and where sixteen syllables are counted enough for a poem if you arrange the punctuation properly, one might make a very little poem.” A year after his previous draft, Pound crafted the final haiku-like combination of words, drawing on this traditional form of Japanese poetry consisting of exactly seventeen syllables. In his September 1914 article in the Fortnightly Review, Pound quoted a well-known, haiku-like verse as emblematic of the kind of descriptive and precise images he sought to capture his experience in the metro: “The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: / A butterfly.”
There are two versions of “In a Station of the Metro.” The first version was published in 1913 in Poetry with extra spacing for emphasis:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Pound was fascinated by the possibility of useing the typesetting of a poem to influence the way it was read. The large gaps of space between single words, phrases, and punctuation control the reader’s pace, giving the poem a heightened sense of drama. Three years later, the spacing was conventionalized and the widely anthologized version was published:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
In crafting this poem, Pound drew directly from the three essential principles that he articulated about Imagism. First, he directly treats the image of the people he saw in the metro. Second, there is absolutely no excess of language; every one of the twenty words that constitute the poem—including the six words of the title—are essential to the success of the image produced. Lastly, Pound breaks from the monotonous rhythms of his poetic predecessors to produce a melodic measure instead of sing-song verse.
Using his idea of a one-image poem, Pound places the image of the faces of the women and children at the metro on top of a classic image from the natural world. The poem must be read as beginning with its title. As Kenner observed, the title is necessary “so that we can savor the vegetal contrast with the world of machines: this is not any crowd, moreover, but a crowd seen underground.” We are in the world of Homer’s The Odyssey, where Odysseus saw crowds in Hades. By using the word “apparition,” the faces in the crowd have the detached quality of something remarkable and unexpected that appears. The faces that Pound saw seem to materialize or become visible in the crowd. There are no flowers in this subterranean world, yet by invoking the image of petals, Pound softens the hectic pace of commuter traffic into a moment of great beauty. The faces become velvet petals all connected to one limb of being. The addition of “wet” and “black” intensifies the feeling of the moment with the deep richness of colour after a rain shower.
Pound concretely and directly presents the “luminous detail” of this memory of the crowd. Like the Chinese ideographs Pound studied, “In a Station of the Metro” succinctly encapsulates the idea of a thing in a single image.
What Do I Read Next?
- Pound was an amazing person in life who knew almost everybody involved with poetry. This meant, since his friends were writers, that many wrote about him. Two noteworthy books about him are End of Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound by H.D., published by New Directions in 1979 and Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeth’s, published in 1975.
- Pound’s correspondences with one of the greatest names in twentieth-century literature can be found in Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, published in 1967 with commentary and an introduction by Forrest Reid.
- In 1960, noted literary critic M. L. Rosenthal published A Primer of Ezra Pound, a short (56-page) book that prepares readers for all aspects of the poet’s works.
- Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, published in 1972, compiles essays about Pound by dozens of well-known authors, including William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke and Joseph Conrad, to name just a scant few. The book is organized in chronological order and edited by Eric Homberger.
- Burton Raffel’s 1984 biography Ezra Pound: Prime Minister of Poetry gives a concise but thorough overview of the poet’s life, which is always interesting to read about.
Many years after he wrote “In a Station of the Metro,” Pound reiterated his insistence about the importance of images in his essay “How To Read”: “One ‘moves’ the reader only by clarity. In depicting the motions of the ‘human heart’ the durability of the writing depends on the exactitude. It is the thing that is true and stays true that keeps fresh for the new reader.” Pound’s famous poem has certainly proved its durability as one of the most notable works in the twentieth century.
“when the vision is the sudden perception of something mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be discovered, the mood is called Yugen ...”
Pound abandoned Imagism after poet Amy Lowell decided to write and promote Imagist poetry; Pound sarcastically renamed the movement “Amygism” and moved on to begin what he called Vorticism, which focused on the effect of systems of energies. In any event, concentrated images continue to be present in Pound’s later poetry, especially in his greatest work, The Cantos. Moreover, even though the Imagist movement was relatively short lived, its influence is evident in the works of other great twentieth-century American poets such as William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore.
Source: Marisa Pagnattaro, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.
Jyan-Lung Lin
Ezra Pound’s use of the Japanese haiku technique in his works is detailed in the following excerpt.
[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]
[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]
Source: Jyan-Lung Lin, “Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ as a Yugen Haiku” in Paideuma, Vol. 21, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring & Fall, 1992, pp.175-183.
Steve Ellis
The use of punctuation in Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is examined here.
“... ‘In a Station’seems to prescribe no clear role for the ‘critical’ reader; its extreme condensation give it a sense of being analysis- resistant ...”
[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]
[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]
Source: Steve Ellis, “The Punctuation of ‘In a Station of the Metro’” in Paideuma, Vol 17, Nos. 2 & 3, Fall & Winter, 1988, pp. 201-207.
Sources
Alexander, Michael, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound, University of California Press, 1979, p. 247.
Ginsberg, Allen, “The Death of Ezra Pound,” in his Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, edited by Gordon Ball, McGraw-Hill, 1974, pp. 179-87.
Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era, University California Press, 1971.
O’Connor, William Van, Ezra Pound, (“University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers” series, No. 26), University of Minnesota Press, 1963.
Pound, Ezra, Gaudier-Brzeska New Directions, 1970.
Pound, Ezra, “How I Began,” in T.P. ‘s Weekly, June 6, 1913, reprinted in Ezra Pound, edited by Noel Stock, 1965.
Pound, Ezra, “How to Read,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New Directions, 1918.
Pound, Ezra, “Vorticism,” in Fortnightly Review, September 1, 1914.
Pratt, William, “Ezra Pound and the Image,” in Ezra Pound: The London Years: 1908-1920, edited by Philip Grover, AMS Press, 1978, pp. 15-30.
Stanford, Donald E., “Ezra Pound, 1885-1972,” in Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry, University of Delaware Press, 1983, pp. 13-38.
Tucker, John, “Poetry or Doubletalk: Pound and Modernist Poetics,” in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer, 1985, pp. 39-48.
For Further Study
Bevilaqua, Ralph, “Pound’s ‘In A Station of the Metro’: A Textual Note,” in English Language Notes, Vol. VIII, No. 1, September 1970, pp. 293-96.
This essay does a thorough job of analyzing how the idea of Imagism shows through in Pound’s poem, with special attention given to the open meaning of the word “apparition.”
Knapp, James, Ezra Pound, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.
Knapp’s discussion jumps a little erratically between description of chronological order of events and literary analysis, making the story of Pound’s early writing slightly difficult to follow.
Miner, Earl, “Pound, Haiku, and the Image,” in Ezra Pound: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963.
This essay brings out some very observant points about Pound’s work, and there is no question that the Japanese haiku was an influence on the poet, even though understanding the connection is not crucial for understanding the poem.
Pratt, William, The Imagist Poem, New York: E.P. Dutton Co., 1963.
This book is a very useful source for understanding Imagist poetry and its history. Pratt provides hundreds of examples of Imagist poems and poems that were influenced by the movement.