An overview of “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 that—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.

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.

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.