Is this one of the most important poems of the 20th century?

[milo]

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

By Ezra Pound

What makes this poem so consequential?
Why is it considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century?

What do you as a reader make of it?

[rowens]

"I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

  Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in

  it after all, a place for the genuine."

The Pound poem sums up "Modern" life, that is art, passing strangers and acquaintances, translation of other cultures, speed and brevity produced through technology. The impersonal face. Art and poetry as what you see in it. The profound as simple shrug. The urinal in the gallery. The importance of the critic and the curator to make decisions of public taste.
With a sense of security comes a sense of anxiety, and safety with anxiety produces art, and more art creates more room for critics and curators as serious artists of taste in their own right.

Sensibilities and understandings are curated, and poems like this can be looked at from different angles and elaborated on. The brief image is accessible and quick to read, the critic can use it to make points and anchor positions. It's an Ezra Pound autograph in poetry, which is particular to him: making an Eastern Form into a Western Form and describing Modern Life. Blurring of people and days, fleeting wet and solid.


I am a specialist in Modern Poetry. It is the poetry of making sense in the sense of making things up and using those things to make sense itself. I think H. D. said that. 



                                                                            "The World Is Quiet Here."

---

H. D. didn't say that.
But we must not say so.
For the lit candle wanes no less for being wax than the moon on any or another personal holiday.

[milo]

"I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

  Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in

  it after all, a place for the genuine."

The Pound poem sums up "Modern" life, that is art, passing strangers and acquaintances, translation of other cultures, speed and brevity produced through technology. The impersonal face. Art and poetry as what you see in it. The profound as simple shrug. The urinal in the gallery. The importance of the critic and the curator to make decisions of public taste.
With a sense of security comes a sense of anxiety, and safety with anxiety produces art, and more art creates more room for critics and curators as serious artists of taste in their own right.

Sensibilities and understandings are curated, and poems like this can be looked at from different angles and elaborated on. The brief image is accessible and quick to read, the critic can use it to make points and anchor positions. It's an Ezra Pound autograph in poetry, which is particular to him: making an Eastern Form into a Western Form and describing Modern Life. Blurring of people and days, fleeting wet and solid.


I am a specialist in Modern Poetry. It is the poetry of making sense in the sense of making things up and using those things to make sense itself. I think H. D. said that. 



                                                                            "The World Is Quiet Here."

---

H. D. didn't say that.
But we must not say so.
For the lit candle wanes no less for being wax than the moon on any or another personal holiday.

yah, I have struggled with this poem since the first time I read it.  Many considered it a banner for a new movement - the war on victorian fussiness or what not.

Part of it feels like it is trying too hard to be avant gard.

But then, it doesn't quite escape anyway.  Double modification?  Pound would certainly call that out, I think.

I read a paper once insisting it is a sonnet in the simplest sense with 14 words instead of lines and the volta happening at the cut (word 9)

thanks for responding

[busker]

It's popular because Ezra Pound, the poet laureate of pseudo intellectualism. Lobotomised dimwits think him to be some sort of fucking genius poet who straddled east and west or something like that, but he didn't. He was a tedious poser who wrote like what I imagine Donal Trump Jr would write like. 

People who claim they like Pound think they like him because hey, everyone who's smart likes Pound. For some unfathomable reason.

The poem itself - it's okay, an observation. Not great, not terrible.

---

PS - this is before his anti semitism or the general nastiness of this usurper as a person, but based on the vapid mediocrity of his work alone. After all, there was a time when it didn't take much other than being a white American to be celebrated in Europe.

[milo]

It's popular because Ezra Pound, the poet laureate of pseudo intellectualism. Lobotomised dimwits think him to be some sort of fucking genius poet who straddled east and west or something like that, but he didn't. He was a tedious poser who wrote like what I imagine Donal Trump Jr would write like. 

People who claim they like Pound think they like him because hey, everyone who's smart likes Pound. For some unfathomable reason.

The poem itself - it's okay, an observation. Not great, not terrible.

---

PS - this is before his anti semitism or the general nastiness of this usurper as a person, but based on the vapid mediocrity of his work alone. After all, there was a time when it didn't take much other than being a white American to be celebrated in Europe.

hmmm . . . you definitely feel pretty strongly about E. Pound.  He has a bit of a reputation as a rather horrible person.  I know some who are fond of his poetry, he is one of those I just never got around to reading.  He was also, iirc, the chief editor of Poetry magazine at the time as well as the founder of the imagist movement so he had kind of a strangle hold on poetry.

That being said, I was more interested in this particular poem and why it has such a reputation as either the most important or one of the most important poems of the 20th century.  It's pretty short to carry such gravitas.

Thanks for the reply