Hello and welcome to the Discourse. Ezra Pound was an American expatriate poet and literary critic who was born in 1885 in Harley, Idaho and he died in 1972. While Modernism and Free verse were becoming vogue in the American literary scenario of his time, he was more interested in classical poetry and often criticized the early Modernist movement in America. In 1908, Ezra moved to Spain where he self-published his first poetry collection titled A Lume Spento (With Tapers Quenched) in Venice. He moved to London in the same year and he found that he couldn’t appreciate the verbose Victorian verses often used by Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Tennyson, and others. Thus, Ezra Pound not only criticized early Modernist poetry but also criticized Victorian poetry too which he found stirring, pompous, and propagandistic. Ezra Pound believed that poetry is not a versified moral essay, rather, the purpose of poetry is to express the individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract.
Ezra Pound famously commented
“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions. If one have a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”
Ezra Pound rejected the modernist approach of cubism and abstracts in poetry but he endorsed another modernist approach of Vorticism that he named himself and defined as extending imagism to art. Pound established himself as a huge proponent of Imagism in poetry. While many of his poems were published in Poetry Magazine and Blast, he was actively involved in establishing The Egoist a London-based literary magazine published from 1914 to 1919.
During his time in London, Pound became a close friend of W.B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Olivia Shakespeare. In 1910, Ezra Pound published his first book of literary criticism which was titled The Spirit of Romance in London. In 1912, he became the foreign correspondent of Poetry Magazine and in the same year, his collection of 25 poems titled Ripostes of Ezra Pound was published in London which also included a translation of The Seafarer, an Old-English poem from the 8th century.
His other important work was The Cantos which is a long incomplete poem in 120 sections that he wrote during 1915-1962 which is often termed as the finest example of modern imagist poetry of the twentieth century. In The Cantos, Pound mentioned T. S. Eliot as Possum. He also mentioned his other friends including W. B Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and A. R. Orage who was the editor of the socialist journal titled The New Age. T. S. Eliot also mentioned Ezra Pound and dedicated his famous work The Wasteland to Ezra Pound which was published in 1922. The Wasteland is considered the central force of the movement of modernist poetry in the twentieth century. Ezra Pound strenuously helped in editing and revisioning The Wasteland and T. S. Eliot mentioned him in The Wasteland as Il Migliore fabbro which means “the better craftsman,” a reference to Canto 26 of the Purgatorio of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
Ezra Pound was influenced by Eastern poetic styles like Japanese haiku and he also translated 25 classical Chinese poems and published them under the title Cathay in 1915. His poem In a Station of the Metro which was published in 1913 in the literary magazine Poetry is considered to be the very first haiku published in English. Though this poem is not written in the traditional 3-line, 17-syllable structure of haiku, it does include strong imagery.
Structure of In a Station of the Metro:
The poem is just two lines long with only fourteen words. None of the words used by Ezra Pound is a verb and thus, it is an excellent example of verbless poetry form. Ezra Pound experimented in this poem to avoid the usual Pentameter and infuse the poem with strong visual spacing as a poetry device. The poem is written in free verse with no complete rhyme but an end slant rhyme. Ezra Pound used Assonance, Juxtaposition, Imagery, Parataxis, and Metaphor in these two lines.
Traditionally, a haiku focuses on a specific element of the natural world, using extremely concise and specific images to do so in a concise manner. Ezra Pound was a modernist poet who got inspiration from the Haiku style but didn’t copy it slavishly rather introduced his own originality. Thus while Pound linked images to express his emotions, he used only two lines with no verbs. He wrote the poem by combining two sentence fragments, each with a subject, but without an action, for that subject to perform. While the poem captures a moment, nothing happens during it and the poem appears as an observation. It appears as if the poet has taken two still photographs and positioned them side by side.
Summary of In a Station of the Metro:
“The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.”
The poem is an excellent example of imagism in which Pound rejected long, flowing poetic descriptions in favor of concise, precise images. An imagist poet considers the image itself as the best description of his emotions and thus, Pound expressed the images that he could envisage while observing the crowd in a metro station in Paris, France. The poet doesn’t reveal if he is a passenger traveling in the metro train standing at the metro station, or if he is standing at the station while waiting for his train to catch. The poet describes the faces of people that he observed at the station as a ‘crowd’ which suggests that the station was rather busy. He compares these faces to "petals on a wet, black bough," suggesting that on the dark subway platform, the people look like flower petals stuck on a tree branch after a rainy night.
As one can see, the two fragments of the poem do not make any meaning when read alone. However, when we read it as a poem, we realize that metaphor has been used to compare the crowd surrounding a train standing on a station on both platforms with petals or leaves on a strong black, wet tree trunk.
The poem is astoundingly concise and short which necessitates the most proper words to be used. It contains only 14 words that exactly express the emotions and feelings of the poet when he observed the moment at the metro station, and that is the purpose of imagist poetry, In the first line, the poet used the word ‘apparition’ which suggests that the people in the crowd are in so much hurry that they are oblivious of each other as if all of them are dead or ghosts. Furthermore, while these faces in the crowd are visible to the observer right now at the station, once the train moves, all these faces will be gone and will likely never be visible again, just like ghosts. While the first line expresses a daily routine of the modern world, the second line introduces a completely natural and primal scene of a wet tree trunk, covered with leaves during rainfall. The second line suggests that despite being modern and completely artificial, the metro station does have a natural element that offers it natural beauty.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of American English Literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards
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