Ezra Pound's Imagism

Ezra Pound led writers in early 20th Century into a new style writing that he termed "Imagism." Pound was reacting to the earlier, sentimental and ornate style of poetry. Various writers turned to Pound to edit their writing and get it published, including W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost.

For example, Ezra Pound is responsible for the content and form of T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. This poem is said to show the every essence of the American Modern literature movement. Pound edited out quite a bit of Eliot's poem's content and encouraged devices like, "sudden shifts in perspective, unacknowledged quotations in different languages, and the presentation of an individual consciousness against a panorama of the age," (Norton 348). Pound's primary body of work is "The Cantos," which he continually updated and published throughout his life.

Pound established several rules to govern the Imagist movement; "the direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective, to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, use musical phrasing in terms of rhythm," (Norton 347). Pound's own definition of an 'Image' is, "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time," (Norton 347). He expresses his definition of a captured image in his poem "In a Station of the Metro." The whole poem is all of one sentence; nothing superfluous or ornate to dress its expression of image. The poem states,

"The apparition of these wet faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough," (Pound 351).

I chose to display the poem separate from the text of the paragraph because in the Imagist movement, the presentation of the text influences the image expressed to the readers. In Pound's above poem, readers can actually visualize the long "metro" of the first line moving past the "station" of the second line. The another image supplied by poem is that of metaphor of the metro as a, "wet, black bough" with its passengers, "these faces in the crowd," being, "petals."