Introduction The Ezra Pond’s “In a Station of the Metro” and William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” are being often referred to as good examples of modernist poetry, which became especially popular among intellectual decadents of early 20 th century, who strived to rid the poetry of “Victorian pretentiousness”, by encouraging readers to associate their poems’ semantic message with the literal meaning of the words, used in these poems. Pond’s poem consists of only two lines (it actually can hardly be thought of as a poem), which simply relate author’s experience of being present in Metro at La Concorde, Paris, with utter exactness: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough” Main body In this poem, Pond strived to provide readers with the insight on his state of mind, at the time when he experienced a poetic inspiration, by artificially increasing the levels of poem’s intensity. In its turn, this was made possible by author’s carefully selecting the words he intended to use, during the course of composing this particular poem. This is one of the most distinguishing features of modernist poetry – modernists intentionally reduce the actual size of their poetic writings. However, this does not affect the literary value of modernist poems, because readers are still able to get the grasp of the full spectrum of ideas, modernist authors wanted to express. Pond’s “In a Station of the Metro” is nothing but a highly condensed poetic message, the sheer intensity of which, makes up for the fact that this poem only consists of two lines. At the same time, the fact that Pond’s poem is rather sparse on words, still does not allow us to interpret it freely – we get to feel exactly the same set of emotions that were being felt by the author, when he wrote “In a Station of the Metro”, because the words, utilized in this poem, do not have a double meaning. They are being used to make a concrete statement, rather then to prompt readers to think of them as a part of poetic allegory. The same can be said about Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”. In it, author simply describes the set of ideas, which came about in his mind, as the result of him perceiving the sight of a red wheelbarrow, with white chickens standing nearby. Obviously enough, this sight had triggered some powerful, but illusive emotion, in poet’s mind. However, in order to remain intellectually honest with his readers, Williams does not provide them with the contextual meaning of this emotion – he simply states what he felt, without trying to make poem sounding more conventional: “so much depends upon a red wheel” Modernist poets think of poetry as “thing in itself” – they do not utilize poetic tools to describe or to evaluate the surrounding reality. Instead, they strive to create different reality in their poems, while believing that the product of one’s imagination is more “real” then the objective reality, if being dramatic enough. This is the reason why the emotional intensity is one of the main characteristics of this particular Williams’ poem, just as it is the case with Pond’s “In a Station of the Metro”. In this poem, author managed to entitle a seemingly banal physical object (wheelbarrow) with properties of “existential symbol”. However, Williams did not resort to an