Life & Background
Pound was born in Idaho in 1885, studied Romance languages, and left America for Europe in 1908. In London he became the organising force of literary modernism: he founded Imagism, edited and drastically cut The Waste Land, secured publication for Joyce, promoted Frost, Eliot, H.D., and Wyndham Lewis, and served as foreign editor for Poetry magazine. He moved to Paris and then to Rapallo in Italy, where he became an admirer of Mussolini and developed obsessive theories about usury, banking, and Jews. During the war he made hundreds of radio broadcasts from Italy attacking the American war effort, and in 1945 was arrested for treason, held in an open cage at a camp near Pisa, and then declared unfit to stand trial. He spent twelve years in St Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington and returned to Italy on release, where he died in 1972.
In a Station of the Metro
The poem is two lines long. It records the apparition of faces in a crowd on a Paris underground platform, and sets beside them petals on a wet, black bough. Pound described its composition at length: he had come out of a Metro train at La Concorde, saw one beautiful face after another, spent a day trying to find words equal to the emotion, wrote a poem of thirty lines and destroyed it, tried again six months later at half the length, and a year later arrived at the two-line version, which he called a hokku-like sentence.
The poem is the practical demonstration of Imagism, whose principles Pound set out as direct treatment of the thing, no word that does not contribute to the presentation, and composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than the metronome. Its method is superimposition — two images placed together with no verb, no simile, and no explanation, so that meaning arises from the juxtaposition itself, a technique he derived from his reading of Japanese haiku and from Fenollosa's account of the Chinese written character. That method of ideogrammic juxtaposition, expanded enormously, becomes the organising principle of The Cantos, which run to over a hundred and twenty sections of history, economics, translation, and fragment.
Why Pound Matters
No single figure did more to make literary modernism happen: Pound's editing of The Waste Land alone reshaped the century's most influential poem, and his slogan to make it new became the movement's motto. He also created the modern practice of poetic translation as re-creation, in Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius. His fascism and antisemitism are inseparable from any account of him, and the question of how to read a major poet whose politics were monstrous is a standard, and unavoidable, examination topic.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Ripostes1912
- Cathay1915
- Hugh Selwyn Mauberley1920
- The Cantos1917–69
- ABC of Reading1934
- The Pisan Cantos1948