Why is Ezra Pounds “In a Station of the Metro” so widely anthologized?
I think several things make the poem a critical text. It’s one of the very earliest modernist texts (pubished in 1916, one of the few first editions I wished I owned). Think of the worst excesses of Romantic poetry: rank sentimentality, tortured syntax, excessive length — “In a Station of the Metro” slices through them all with a clean cut. It was a highly influential, important poem in its moment. As a representative of Imagism itself, which emphasized concrete imagery and brevity, it is difficult to do better. It’s also a good representative of what became known as Orientalism, a general Western literary interest in Eastern poetic tradition. Haiku is an enormous source of Imagist inspiration; most of the Imagist poets worked in or borrowed heavily from the form. Within Pound’s own career, it’s important as a signal work. Pound’s career began in translation, and what he learned from it made his original work possible: meticulous attention to language, precision, formal constraint. As
