The Analysis of The Poem "In a Station of The Metro" by Ezra Pound

Ezra pound or what I would call him the influencer. Ezra is one of the guys who left his touch throughout his poetic in the twentieth-century literature. With no doubt when we mention Ezra two things come into our mind his art, and his poetic.

Speaking about poems one of his greatest work ever “In a Station of the Metro”. This poem is very short, and he made it somehow mysterious. For example, the author described seeing faces on the station, and he did not describe his point neither as a passenger nor as driver. Pound claims that it is crowd which means a lot of people are on the station which leads us to recognize that the station is obviously very busy.

The most important thing pound made this poem very short which is only two lines. Simply, we can compare it to Japanese Haiku both of them focusing on single moment of experience followed by a moment of reflection. What we could understand that when the doors open the faces appears then the doors shut the faces are gone. In another way to describe it one moment, there are faces as much as it clear it can be, in the other hand, the next moment it dispreads even the mind cannot remember what was going on previously.

Pound made an image on the reader’s mind while the readers reading they can imagine the station, the train, and the faces. If we take close look, we can find that Pound did not use any verbs among the descriptive words which make readers recognize something pound is very creative in his works. The author has insisted to create kind of scary image because he used the word “apparition” he could use “shows” or “display”, but in fact he decided to “apparition” because it means an unexpected sight. Let us just do not forget that the two lines of the poem match the topic. From the first time reading “In a Station of the Metro” for sure many of readers will get confused because it does not make any sense, however the relationship with these two moments will create a sense for readers.

In fact, using only fourteen words make us understand that Pound has chosen these words very carefully for a specific image. From the poem title it is easy to notice the location which is Paris and for more information, the research mentions “La Concorde”. To conclude, it all depends on the readers how they understand the poem. For some, it is clear as much as crystal for others it is very confusing because of sentence fragments. I believe that it is not impossible to define.

Works Cited

1. Bush, R. (2015). The Influencer: Ezra Pound's Journalism in London and Paris, 1908-1925. Journal of Modern Literature, 38(4), 109-133.
2. Carpenter, H. (2017). Modernist Short Poetry: Ezra Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro". Journal of Modern Literature, 41(4), 1-14.
3. Cook, A. M. (2018). Ezra Pound and Imagism. In A Companion to Modernist Poetry (pp. 79-93). Wiley.
4. Cope, A. (2016). "Faces in a Metro": An Analysis of Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro". ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 29(3), 150-153.
5. Drysdale, C. R. (2020). Ezra Pound's Poetics of Place: Imagining Cities through "In a Station of the Metro". Literature Compass, 17(12), e12677.
6. Gordon, A. (2019). Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" and the Haiku Tradition. Notes and Queries, 66(4), 606-608.
7. Homberger, E. (2014). Ezra Pound: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan.
8. Pound, E. (1913). In a Station of the Metro. Poetry, 2(2), 49.
9. Surette, L. (2015). The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, WB Yeats, and the Occult. University Press of Florida.
10. Wilhelm, J. J. (2016). Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years (1925-1972). University Press of Illinois.