Ezra Pound

## Biography

One of the most influential poets of the early modern period, Ezra Pound was born in 1885 in a provincial town in Idaho and grew up in Pennsylvania. Disappointed with American life and culture, he soon went to Europe and took a deep interest in the old literatures of Provence and of Italy. Pound lived in Italy and, from 1909-1920, in London, working as translator, literary critic, poet, and editor of journals. He discovered and promoted such writers as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Hart Crane, and Ernest Hemingway while living in Paris (1920-24) and again in Italy (1940-45).

Opposed to capitalism and Jews, he supported the Fascist movement and saw in Mussolini a follower of Thomas Jefferson. Because of his pro-Fascist and anti-American radio broadcasts during the war, he was arrested and charged with treason in 1945. Until 1958 he was in a mental institution in America and then returned to live in Italy.

He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy, and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917.

Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. He associated with many writers, including William Butler Yeats, for whom he worked as a secretary, and T.S. Eliot, whose *Waste Land* he drastically edited and improved. He was a link between the United States and Britain, acting as contributing editor to Harriet Monroe’s important Chicago magazine *Poetry* and spearheading the new school of poetry known as Imagism, which advocated a clear, highly visual presentation. After Imagism, he championed various poetic approaches. He eventually moved to Italy, where he became caught up in Italian Fascism.

In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during World War II. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound’s political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, on November 1, 1972.

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot.

His life-work was *The Cantos*, which he wrote and published until his death. They contain brilliant passages, but their allusions to works of literature and art from many eras and cultures make them difficult.

### Controversy

When people speak of Pound's antisemitism, they are thinking primarily of the antisemitic tirades included in the speeches that he broadcast over Rome Radio between 1941 and 1943. Although, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II, Pound stopped his broadcasts for two months, he resumed them on January 29, 1942. Since the United States was now at war with Italy, Pound's radio attacks on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and praise of Benito Mussolini seemed, to the United States government, to be the acts of a traitor and, on July 26, 1943, Pound was indicted for treason in Washington.

### Legacy

* Founder of IMAGINISM and VORTICISM
* Responsible for the IDEOGRAMMATIC METHOD inspired by Chinese ideograms that allowed poetry to deal with abstract content through concrete images.
* Central to numerous traditions of experimental poetry in the 20th century.
* Great influence for American and western literature, especially poetry. For example, parataxis and free verse in Ginsberg.
* Helped shape the careers of many 20th century´s most influential writers like W.B. Yeats, T.S.Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence.
* Praised the work of the long-neglected composer Antonio Vivaldi
* Contribute to introduce provincial, Chinese and Japanese poetry and drama to English-speaking audiences.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### Interwar-period

Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States’ traumatic “coming of age,” despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. Shocked and permanently changed, Americans returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence.

Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life. New farm machines such as planters, harvesters, and binders had drastically reduced the demand for farm jobs; yet despite their increased productivity, farmers were poor. Crop prices, like urban workers’ wages, depended on unrestrained market forces heavily influenced by business interests: Government subsidies for farmers and effective workers’ unions had not yet become established.

### Modernism

Intellectual currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of evolution), implied a “godless” world view and contributed to the breakdown of traditional values.

The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as well as from Western civilization’s classical traditions.

Technological innovation in the world of factories and machines inspired new attentiveness to technique in the arts. To take one example: Light, particularly electrical light, fascinated modern artists and writers. Posters and advertisements of the period are full of images of floodlit skyscrapers and light rays shooting out from automobile headlights, moviehouses, and watchtowers to illumine a forbidding outer darkness suggesting ignorance and old-fashioned tradition.

Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. No longer was it sufficient to write a straightforward third-person narrative or (worse yet) use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the story was told became as important as the story itself.

#### The Lost Generation

Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, the older generation they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, allowed Americans with dollars — like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound — to live abroad handsomely on very little money.

Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young Americans of the 1920s were “the lost generation” — so named by literary portraitist Gertrude Stein. Without a stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity. The secure, supportive family life; the familiar, settled community; the natural and eternal rhythms of nature that guide the planting and harvesting on a farm; the sustaining sense of patriotism; moral values inculcated by religious beliefs and observations — all seemed undermined by World War I and its aftermath.

Numerous novels, notably Hemingway’s *The Sun Also Rises* (1926) and Fitzgerald’s *This Side of Paradise* (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation. In T.S. Eliot’s influential long poem *The Waste Land* (1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal).

Though first intended to denote Americans brought to Europe by the First World War, the “Lost Generation” refers to writers and other artists from the United States who took up residence in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. A colony of artists from the United States really had established themselves in Paris, using the mechanisms of a burgeoning print culture to reject perceptions about them and to forge new collaborations with their European hosts.

#### Imagism

Imagism owes its name to Ezra Pound. As a poetic movement it flourished between 1909 and 1917 and was international. In England, it included T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, and D.H. Lawrence; in America the Imagists were represented by "H.D." (i.e. Hilda Doolittle, John Gould Fletcher, and Amy Lowell. **Opposed to the romantic conception of poetry** and inspired by Greek and Roman classics as well as by Chinese, Japanese, and French poets, **the Imagists looked for new forms of expression that were to include common speech and new rhythms instead of poetic language and traditional metre**. **Free verse** and **concise metaphors** and **images** became the favorite forms and modes of expression.

Pound furthered Imagism in letters, essays, and an anthology. In a letter to Monroe in 1915, he argues for a **modern sounding, visual poetry that avoids “clichés and set phrases.”** In “A Few Don’ts of an Imagiste” (1913), **he defined “image” as something that “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”** Pound’s 1914 anthology of 10 poets, *Des Imagistes*, offered examples of Imagist poetry by outstanding poets, including William Carlos Williams, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell.

Pound started this movement after studying Japanese forms of poetry like waka verse and haiku. These forms have strict conventions and are typically very frugal with words. According to Imagism, poets should write "in fear of abstractions." He derived its **technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.”**

##### Principles

1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. Regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

“It is the presentation of such a complex instantaneous which gives that 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. Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.”

#### Vorticism

Avant-garde movement initiated in London by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. Pound defined the vortex as the point of maximum energy that also represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency. Influenced by Italian futurism (which they also criticized as sensational and sentimental) the Vorticists described England as an industrial island machine. Unlike the Futurists, they rejected images of chaos and fluid energy in favour of hard disruptive clarity. Pound suggested that Vorticism was, expressionism, neo-cubism, and imagism gathered together.

Its literary significance is negligible exceptin that Ezra Pound regarded it as an advance upon his previous phase of Imagism. The Vorticist manifestos that appeared in the two issues of Lewis's magazine *Blast* (1914-15) celebrated the dynamic energies of the machine age while accusing Futurism of having romanticized the machine. Vorticism called for an end to all sentimentality, and for a new abstraction that would, paradoxically, be both dynamic and static. For Pound the Vortex was the concentrated energy of the Avant-Garde, which was to blast away the complacency of the established culture. Vorticism was thus one of the minor currents of Modernism.

### Literary Style

For his own verse Pound drew on the poetic forms and ideas of a number of predecessors. His poetry ranges from the early collection *Personae* (1909), in which he used voices and masks in the style of Browning and Pre-Raphaelite lyrics, to the free poetic adaptation *Umbra* (1920), the superb autobiographical satire in verse, *Hugh Selwyn Mauberley* (1920), and his life's work, *The Cantos*.

"The Bathtub" (1913) is an ironic Imagist poem imitating the Japanese "haiku" form.

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,

When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,

So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,

O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

Pound began with the writing of *The Cantos* as early as 1917, and this work kept him busy until his death, presenting a synopsis of human history as well as a diagnosis of modern civilization in a highly ambiguous verse that is characterized by numerous allusions to the cultural history of the East and West. The unifying centre of this "long poem", which refers to Dante, Homer, and twentieth-century politics with equal ease, is the "stream of poetic consciousness". Pound contrasts the corruption of Western civilization with the order and harmony of Chinese philosophy and the "universal man" of the Renaissance.

What Pound attempted with *The Cantos* is a poetic vision of the cultural history of the Orient and Occident in a sort of "guided tour" through the history of world literature that includes unresolved philosophical and political problems, formal experiments and parody. Ezra Pound did not achieve a final and complete poetic form, but *The Cantos* continue to impress readers with their numerous masterful lyrical passages.

Pound’s poetry is best known for its clear, visual images, fresh rhythms, and muscular, intelligent, unusual lines, such as, in Canto LXXXI, “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world,” or in poems inspired by Japanese haiku, such as “In a Station of the Metro” (1916).

#### Recurring Themes

* **The Importance of Aesthetics and Art**: Ezra Pound lived and wrote in a swiftly modernizing world that, as time went on, placed less and less emphasis on art and beauty. Pound, however, was dissatisfied by this, and made it a point to celebrate art, literature, and beauty in his poetry.

* **Imagism:** Since Pound pioneered the Imagist movement, its overarching style and themes resonate throughout his poems. He placed significant value on **clarity and economy of language**. Pound felt that **classic poetry, namely Greek and Roman**, presented many model examples of Imagism, and frequently referred back to those ancient verses in his work. He also praised **the verbal economy of traditional Japanese and Chinese poetry**. A notable example of Imagism in Pound's work is "In a Station of the Metro." It is extremely short, only two lines long, and says only what it needs to say and nothing more. Pound originally wrote thirty lines for this poem, and then proceeded to whittle it down to 14 crucial syllables.

* **Nature:** Pound often uses unexpected natural **metaphors to reflect on people, business, and society**. "In A Station of the Metro," he compares the faces on a subway platform to petals on a tree branch. In "A Virginal," the speaker compares his lover to a green spring and in "The River-Merchant's Wife," Pound compares the wife's sadness to sober monkeys and swiftly spreading moss. **By frequently including nature into his work, Pound alludes to his love of aesthetics and beauty.**

* **Other themes:** economics, love, journey, history.

## In a Station of the Metro

1. The apparition of these faces in a crowd:

2. Petals on a wet, black bough.

* **Published:** 1913 in the literary magazine *Poetry*.
* **Setting:** a station of the metro in Paris.

In this one-image poem, Pound describes watching faces appear in a metro station. It is unclear whether he is writing from the vantage point of a passenger on the train itself or on the platform. The setting is Paris, France, and as he describes these faces as a "crowd," meaning the station is quite busy. He compares these faces to "petals on a wet, black bough," suggesting that on the dark subway platform, the people look like flower petals stuck on a tree branch after a rainy night.

* **Context:** Ezra Pound lived a complicated and controversial life. He is well-known for his arrest for treason by the United States government during World War II because of his support for Mussolini’s fascism, and even for Hitler’s government. During his time imprisoned, he suffered a mental breakdown, and spent the next twelve years of his life in a psychiatric hospital.

In a Station of the Metro predates all of this, however — **it was published in 1913 in a literary magazine**, and was written based on **an emotion Pound had felt during a moment standing in a Paris underground metro station in the previous year.** Pound’s anger and resentment of capitalism and the British government was forged by the bloodshed of World War I, and so while none of his bitterness made its way into this text, the complexity of his worldview certainly had.

**The original drafts of In a Station of the Metro was thirty lines long**; Pound was able to cut it down to fourteen words in an attempt to focus entirely **on the economy of his language, and the important images only.** The process of deletion expresses **a modernist-style desire to break away from the typical poetic styles of the time period.** Because of its **succinctness and unique style**, it is considered one of the foremost **examples of Imagist poetry**, even today. Although what would follow in Pound’s life was a long and difficult period of controversy and unhappiness, this poem stands as a strong legacy to his unique worldview, and **incredible capacity to explain and demonstrate powerful emotions with simple images,** different thinking, and, of course, some of **the best economy of the written word** that could possibly exist in poetry.

* **Features:**
	+ Brevity: inspired in the HAIKU form: single moment of experience, followed by a single moment of reflection. Pictorial aesthetics, Japanese verse forms.
	+ Importance of the title:
	+ Clarity: precision, and economy of language (imagism)
	+ No conventional meter or rhyme.
	+ One- syllable words: equal weight when reading.
	+ Two different processes, yet no verb. Clever use of syntax (abbreviated parataxis).
	+ From literal to metaphorical, from the urban to the natural world. New kind of perception: modern and urban but also allusive: Apparition (underworld of classical mythology. Undistinguished crowd: Dante´s souls in Inferno.
	+ Dead souls as leaves in Virgil, Homer, and Milton.
	+ Compression, condensation, instantaneity, suddenness.
	+ Simultaneity, superposition of images.
	+ Immediacy, directness.
	+ Showing instead of telling: ideal of overriding mediation.
	+ Against ornamental aestheticism of the Romantics in the late 19 th c.

* **Themes:**
	+ **Perception, Imagination and Reality:**

“In a Station of the Metro” is concerned above all with imagery: the speaker sees a bunch of people in a subway station and this prompts the speaker to envision petals on a tree branch. This shift is remarkably sudden: in just two lines—a fleeting instant—the speaker sees both petals and a crowd of faces, and manages to vividly convey both images to the reader. The poem's brief form allows it to combine both forms of perception (one happening before the speaker’s eyes, and one happening in their mind), creating a new, blended reality from the speaker's point of view. Overall, then, the poem might be thought of as an attempt to capture the connection between sight and imagination—revealing how these two processes together shape people's perception of the world around them.

The poem also notably doesn't use any verbs. Instead, it is isolated to the rawest, most basic descriptions of images, which contribute to the spontaneity of the speaker’s visual association. In other words, the poem seems to catch the speaker in the act of visually processing a connection between “faces” and “petals” before the speaker even has time to form a complete thought.

A close reading of the poem's language further reveals how the “apparition of these faces in the crowd” could indeed look like “petals on a wet, black, bough.” The word “apparition” provides a new kind of perception: modern and urban as dark and ghostly but also allusive: Apparition, underworld of classical mythology, undistinguished crowd: Dante´s souls in Inferno.

Furthermore, the adjectives modifying “bough” (“wet” and “black”) could also describe the metro station itself: “black” may be appropriate given the station’s dark, underground setting, while “wet” could describe the shimmering metal of the train and its tracks, or even leftover rain on pedestrians’ jackets. Although readers are left to wonder why the speaker draws a visual link between “faces” and “petals,” the poem is not concerned with explaining anything about the speaker or their circumstances. Rather, it is a poem that portrays the instantaneous connection between eye and brain as an association sparks from an image, perhaps celebrating the sudden artistry of this imaginative process.

* + **Urban Life and Natural World:**

As representative of imagism, “In a Station of the Metro” paints a direct picture for the reader. Much of the wonder of this particular poem is the way in which the two images presented contrast with and complement each other, helping the reader "see" these very different objects—a subway station and a wet tree branch—in a new or different way.

Taken on a symbolic level, the poem seems to be juxtaposing two normally opposing realms: that of urban life and that of the natural world. In order to highlight how different, the human-made world is from the natural world both images are placed in such close proximity, or, in the same way, it can be highlighted their similarity. The word "apparition" is especially important in assessing the similarity or difference between the images in the first and second lines. On one hand, this word could suggest a distraction. The "apparition," or the ghostly, blurred appearance of many people in a crowd, might be so dull and homogenous an image that the speaker's brain turns instead to petals.

In other words, all the people rush by so quickly that their faces become indistinguishable from one another, and the speaker becomes distracted, thinking instead of the loveliness of nature. Note that "apparition" also implies a kind of visual dissolving of one image into another. Under this interpretation, the ghostly faces in a metro station, lining up on either side of a track, dissolve in the speaker's mind into the image of petals hanging on either side of a branch. Therefore, both images convey a sense of temporality, since neither is static. In the first, people are traveling from one destination to the next; whatever "faces" appear in the crowd will be replaced by new commuters soon enough. In the second, the tree is wet—likely from rain—and will ostensibly dry, while its petals will eventually fall and be replaced by new ones. In a way, then, this pair of images could suggest everything from the fleeting quality of the moment to the cyclicality of life itself. All in all, urban life and the natural world follow the same universal laws.

## Intro Paragraph

The beginning to the twentieth century had Europe as the home of one of the most horrifying political conflicts ever registered in the history of humanity: The First World War. This political conflict, characterized by a dreadful death toll of both citizens and soldiers, came to change not only the political display of the beaten continent, but also the very set of beliefs ruling the scarred society. The institutions that once had promised to bring comfort and protection to the individual were proven a failure, leaving a sense of dread and fragmentation that did not vanish with the end of the war. It is in this context in which brand new social, intellectual, and artistic ideas emerged to reflect the reality of a broken world, all comprised in what is today called Modernism. In literature, Modernism attempted to break the rules, to create new formats and reject the traditions that were deemed as useless and limiting. This often meant the adoption of free verse in poetry and more ironic, chaotic, allusive pieces meant to be understood only by an elite part of society. Among the referent modernists stands Ezra Pound, a controversial but powerful figure of American literature. Pound was a writer, journalist, and translator part of the mythical Lost Generation, leader of his own movement within the literary world: Imagism. The purpose of Imagist pieces was to create a vivid, clear image that represented an emotional and intellectual complex for the audience to experiment. Finding inspiration in Japanese haikus, Pound believed that the greatest written artworks only needed of a few, precise words to be effective and produce a sense of growth in the individual. In his prime imagist piece “A Station in the Metro”, Pound explores in only two lines the connection between nature and urbanization. It is in this poem where the basis of imagism itself is reflected: the creation of an emotional and intellectual piece throughout few fundamental words.

“A station in the Metro” is a complex poem whose few words can produce a great impact in the reader.

- Emotional and intellectual dimension: purpose and feeling

- Setting and inspiration

- Intellectual dimension: the fragility of time / memento mori

- Juxtaposition of images

- Emotional dimension: melancholy, excitement

One of the finest characteristic of the poem is that its author achieves to create its complexity towards very few words.

- Japanese haikus

- Elements in the poem

- Word “apparition”

- Pound as a writer

### MLA citation

Pound, Ezra. "In a Station of the Metro." 1913. *Ezra Pound -poems-*. Poem Hunter, 2004. pp. 49.

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3  Hans-Peter, Wagner. *A History of British, Irish and American Literature*. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2010.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5  VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. *Outline of American Literature*. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1994. Print.