User:Englishbulldog2023/In a Station of the Metro

Lead
"In a Station of the Metro" is an Imagist poem by Ezra Pound published in April of 1913 within the literary magazine Poetry. In the poem, Pound describes a moment he had in the Paris underground metro station in 1912. He suggested that the faces of the individuals in the metro were best included in the poem with an "equation", rather than a description. Because of the imagery created by the poem's own visuality to describe the subject, it is considered a quintessential Imagist text. It is sometimes suggested to be the first haiku published in English, though it lacks the traditional 3-line, 17-syllable structure of a haiku.

The poem was reprinted in Pound's collection Lustra in 1917, and again in the 1926 anthology Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound, which compiled his early pre-Hugh Selwyn Mauberley works.

Article body
The poem contains only fourteen words (without a verb—making it a good example of the verbless poetry form). Pound was influential to the creation of Imagist poetry until he left the movement to embrace Vorticism in 1914. Though briefly, Pound embraced Imagism, stating that it was an important step away from the verbose style of Victorian literature, suggesting that it "is the sort of American stuff I can show here in Paris without its being ridiculed". "In a Station of the Metro" is an early work of Modernist poetry as it attempts to "break from the pentameter", incorporates the use of visual spacing as a poetic device, and contains no verbs. The work originally appeared with different spacing between the groups of words, which can be found in the 1913 Poetry magazine as one-line.

The poem was first published in 1913 and is considered one of the founding poems of the Imagist tradition. Pound's process of reduction from thirty lines to only fourteen words represents Imagism's focus on economy of language, precision of imagery, and experimentation with non-traditional verse forms. The poem is Pound's written equivalent for his moment of revelation and intense emotion he experienced at the Paris Metro's Concorde station in 1912. The poem is essentially a set of images that have unexpected likeness that convey the emotion Pound was experiencing at that time. Pound explains, "In a poem of this sort, one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."

Like other modernist artists of the period, Pound found inspiration in Japanese art, but often his goal was to re-make and to integrate cultural styles rather than to copy directly. He may have been inspired by a Suzuki Harunobu print he saw in the British Library (Richard Aldington mentions the specific prints he could have matched to verse). It's plausible, that the similarity to the haiku verse style was done intentionally.