In a Station of the Metro (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

American poet Allen Ginsberg has said that Pound was the most important poet of his time, the one poet since Walt Whitman to develop the possibility for a new practice of writing and reading poetry. As Donald E. Stanford indicates, Pound’s search for poetic structures through which to understand his emotional experience led him to discard the structures of logic practiced since the Middle Ages. In place of this he formulated a structure based on juxtaposition of images and ideas; this grounded his theory of Imagism.

Pound felt that Chinese poetry corroborated his “Imagist” principles, although the critic William Van O’Connor senses that Pound’s focus on “Imagism” might have been distorted by his attention to Chinese poetry. There are some who would agree, who see “In a Station of the Metro” as a minor poem, an instance of Pound showing off his sketchy and obscure knowledge of other cultures and literatures. Nevertheless, it is Michael Alexander’s critical opinion that this poem is more than an experiment with the form of haiku: it centers Pound’s entire life’s work.

Pound began to write free verse after he had experimented at great length with set forms of poetry in English. These use meter and rhyme to aid in what Michael Tucker calls the “memorability” necessary for poetry before the printing press and the easy availability of books. The “set form” of haiku, however, lends itself to Pound’s principle of “direct treatment of the thing itself’ which, Tucker suggests, “insists ... on the freedom to select the word that most exactly designates the thing,” whereas the use of meter promotes the inclusion of irrelevant words and the use of rhyme ensures only that the selected word will always rhyme with another. Tucker points out that Pound’s refusal to express emotional experience in the rhyme and meter of set forms would seem to indicate that he would then be writing prose, not poetry. However, his further rejection of what Tucker refers to as “words of secondary importance” necessary for the logical construction of sentences focused him on the image-making potential of words and lines similar to that of haiku. In fact, Tucker employs haiku to clarify Pound’s work in this direction. It is Tucker’s belief that when we insert, for example, the phrase “is like” between the two images of a haiku — to make their relationship explicit — we rob it of the power to communicate in a direct emotional way. In fact, the power of Imagism is nowhere so evident as in Pound’s haiku-poem.

Pound’s “[haiku]-like sentence” established the artistic ideal of Imagism. While this movement extended over a mere ten years, it was responsible for a transformation in poetry and fiction in English, noted by English novelist and critic Virginia Woolf as the change in human nature that was the beginning of Modernism. In Pound’s work, as William Pratt has recognized, this manifested itself in his ability to construct images with words and in his unfailing ear for the poetic rhythm of conversational speech. Both are characteristic of this radical shift and of “In a Station of the Metro,” the poem that confirmed a new understanding of poetry for the twentieth century.