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Overview
“In a Station of the Metro” is a short poem that the American poet Ezra Pound first published in 1913
. Clocking in at just fourteen words, the poem juxtaposes faces in a crowd with petals on a wet branch. Pound’s radical economy of language makes it a chief example of Imagism, a modernist movement that sought to strip away all ornamentation to reveal a single image—or scene—with crystalline clarity. Yet with its reference to the autumn season and its lack of verbs, the poem also draws on the Japanese tradition of the haiku.Read a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of key poetic devices from “In a Station of the Metro.”
