In a Station on the Metro by Ezra Pound

This short poem is a good example of Imagism, a movement Pound put forward based on traditional Chinese and Japanese poetry. Imagism stresses clarity, precision, and economy of language. The poem's structure leads you to consider the two independent images together.

Some ways of thinking about the poem: Why did Pound choose these two images? What's the reward of reading a poem like this?



The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

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.