A bunch of old people hanging about a railway station waiting to die.

That's grim.

Am I wrong to be hearing an echo of these lines?

Dear Nemo

You are a wiser man than I, and a better poet than I could ever hope to be. Truly.

However, opinions on this one seem to be more polarised than on any of the 6 selected.

Michael Cantor placed this in the Imagist camp.

You place it in the Impressionist camp.

Two more extreme camps would be hard to imagine.

Some people think this about the homeless.

Some people think it is about commuters.

Yet others have old people waiting to die.

Without going any further, you can already see from the foregoing why this poem fails utterly.

If it is an Imagist poem, the images are not concrete but blurred and inconsistent, jarring and illogical.

If it is an Impressionist poem it fails to convey what it is an impression of.

Sorry

It's a dud

Philip

Philip - I respect your right to a candid opinion, but I most heartily disagree that this poem is a "dud".

Phillip you forgot to mention at least two people thought it was about bankers, one would be me, the other David Anthony. Should we start making bets on who is right yet? HA!

Donna

Philip, I think the view of the poem as 'impressionist' takes the pressure off worrying about what 'object' it is an impression of, and shifts it to the lens through which that 'object' is viewed. Surely if the Impressionists were only worried about making explicit the subject matter they were painting they would have employed techniques that that did not call so much attention to the color and light of which all things are composed and into which all things dissolve if looked at from a certain perspective. Surely all of reality can be decomposed or discomposed in this manner--regardless of the medium in which one works.

Uncertainty as to the literal object here eliciting these verbal impressions seems to me an important part of what poetry is all about: it's not target practice after all, but a personal investigation into re-envisioning our shared world. The technique employed here seems a valid one to me, one that is mood based, and that allows the hard cold lines of the world to swim just below the surface of the senses.

I think the reason painting metaphors keep arising in this thread is that such a willingness to see through things comes easier to visual artists than writers. If the sort of seeing that writers/thinkers practice in their art employs the intellect rather than the eye to 'see' i.e. to 'understand'--can't that sort of seeing relax in an impressionistic way as well in order to let the habitual pattern of understanding discover some sort of ephemeral wisdom in its own therapeutically blurred vision?

I am not trying to score points here. But this approach to the art of floating through image is dear to my heart and seems so humble that I am often puzzled by the virulence of opinion its lack of delineation inspires.

Nemo

Actually, Philip, what I did was indicate how I felt about the poem. I didn't even know what the Imagist camp was (although I could sort of figure it out from context) when I read your remarks, and had to google. My choice of In a Station of the Metro - which turns out, I gather, to be one of the icons of Imagist poetry - was pure chance. I was googling, trying to find another poem I half-remembered which contained an image of a woman and a scarf floating in the air (as I recalled it) and stumbled into the Pound poem, which also worked for me. So please don't apply labels in my behalf. I do it frequently enough on my own.

Pretentious.

Michael

I apologise. Perhaps you will both understand and forgive the inference I drew from your comment.

Terese

Quite so.

Philip

What I like about this (or what I think it is I'm responding to) is the regularity of the meter, and the way each line is a complete thought, without padding or contortion or bizarre enjambment. It reads smoothly and sounds natural.

I'm not sure I understand the poem, but the last line gets me. Like Gregory, I thought of Poor Tom on the heath.