[R. S. Gwynn]

We discussed this in my grad class last night. Pound claimed that it began as a much longer poem which he whittled down to a "single hokku-like sentence." Has anyone ever heard of the manuscripts of the longer version surviving? I'm half-inclined to think Pound just made up the story, some sort of Borgesian conceit.

[David Mason]

Actually, I think I've seen something written about the editing of that poem, or an anthology containing some of the revisions. Books on Modernism or Imagism might provide the source. If iI find it I'll let you know...

[David Landrum]

Check this link: Personae
According to the reviewer's remarks, below, the original draft of the poem is in this volume:

They removed the post-1926 work, as this shall appear in a future revision of Pavannes and Divagations, and they left out a few previously appendixed poems since they are already printed in The Translations or in Collected Early Poems. & then they added a few extra poems in appendix, the two recently-published war poems of 1914-1915, the original version of "In a Station of the Metro," & the prose poem "Ikon." & that's all of it, as is clear from the table of contents & note on the text. Now then, all that aside, these are absolutely brilliant poems

[Stephen Collington]

Hi Sam,

In Pound's own words (here) :

I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: --

Emphasis added.

Of course, that leaves the possibility of the fifteen-line (?) version still kicking around somewhere in manuscript. But while I'm ready to see David and David prove me wrong* (yes, that's a footnote!), I very strongly suspect that no copy survives. If one did, we'd never hear the end of it; no discussion of "In a Station" could fail to quote it, at least in the footnotes. And we'd have whole dissertations cranked out on an annual basis arguing the relative merits.

Interestingly, Kawamoto Koji in his "Amerika no shi o yomu" (Reading American Poetry, Iwanami shoten 1998) calls the story of the various revisions a "myth" (shinwa). He doesn't give his reasons, but presumably his certainty comes from knowing of the intense efforts Japanese (and other) scholars have put into finding just such manuscript evidence. The Japanese, incidentally, are quite interested in Pound's poem, as you might imagine. The consensus, however, is that it makes for a pretty poor hokku. It is given a kind of bemused and indulgent attention, the sort of thing the sweating foreigner in the noodle shop gets when the owner says, in false admiration, "That's really something . . . you use chopsticks so well!"

For what it's worth, Kawamoto Koji is Professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo, and past president of the International Comparative Literature Association.

Steve C.

* Footnote: While there's no saying without actually looking at Personae, I suspect that the "original version" mentioned by David L.'s Amazon reviewer is actually just a matter of punctuation, viz.:

The earliest printing of "In a Station" in the April 1913 issue of Poetry was spaced and punctuated thus:


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

The same version of the poem then appeared in the New Freewoman on 15 August 1913. In the meantime however, Pound had published an account of the genesis of the poem in T.P.'s Weekly, on 6 June 1913, where the poem is quoted as follows:

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

In other words, the poem has now assumed the format it has in each of its appearances in book, as opposed to periodical, form, from the Elkin Mathews edition of Lustra (1916) onwards, with the exception of the colon as opposed to semi-colon at the end of the first line. That this version was still regarded by Pound as provisional, however, is indicated by his reversal to the earlier spacing and punctuation for the poem's appearance in the August New Freewoman, two months after his piece in T.P.'s Weekly. It seems likely that the latter publication's lay-out of three narrow columns to the page meant that the spacing of "In a Station" had to be closed up and regularized, whether or not this was Pound's intention at the time; the New Freewornan version would indicate, in fact, that it wasn't.

From the same page as the Pound quote above (Steve Ellis, scroll down).

p.s. David L., please use the URL button at the bottom of the Post Reply screen to keep overlong URLs off the screen. This thread is now a "stretcher," requiring much back and forth with the sideways scroll bar. Very annoying! (But we forgive you.)

[Stephen Collington]

Hi Sam,

Lest this get lost as a p.s. to the previous post, I'm adding another.

Reading down on the same "Modern American Poetry" page I linked to above, there is this:

Indeed, the archaic dimension of the "Metro" poem is more pronounced than Pound suggests. He dates the origin of the poem to 1911, without indicating any possible precedent in his earlier published poetry. K. K. Ruthven has demonstrated, however, that the specific "image" of the "Metro" poem derives from a very early poem of Pound's, "Laudantes Decem Pulchritudinis Johannae Templi," published in Exultations (1909). One section of the poem, addressed to "my beloved of the peach trees," describes "the vision of the blossom":

the perfect faces which I see at times
When my eyes are closed—
Faces fragile, pale, yet flushed a little,
like petals of roses:
these things have confused my memories of her. ( CEP 119 )

The essential features of this vision" survive intact in the "Metro" poem:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough. ( GB 89)

(Daniel Tiffany)

Perhaps this is what David M. is thinking of?

At any rate, if it's true that Pound nicked the Metro image from one of his own poems, published years before, then whatever else may be said of the matter, his explanation of the "inspiration process" certainly is (at least partly) "myth."

Hope that's helpful.
Steve C.

[Roger Slater]

I'd love to see the longer version. The short version does absolutely nothing for me.

[Kate Benedict]

I tend to agree. Another mediocre quasi-poem that has mysteriously become canonical and therefore students are exposed to it.

[R. S. Gwynn]

The link to Amazon.com says this:

Known for his delicate perception as well as his passionate opinions, Ezra Pound published this, his first collection of poetry, in 1926. Pound was as much a diviner as he was a poet, and his writing is as much observation and experience as it is prophecy. He was especially drawn to beauty and his writing extols the magnificence of profound emotion and the beguiling wonderment of intellect. From translations and reconstructions of pieces of ancient literature to his own postulations on art, love, and life, this is a worthy addition to any personal library. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

This is wrong on several counts.

The student who did the report produced six or seven different versions, the first from a letter to Harriet Monroe and the last the one that usually appears in books. No words change, but there are interesting variations in spacing and punctuation. The change I find most compelling is the shift from colon to semicolon at the end of the first line. There has apparently been some speculation that it was a printer's error that Pound decided he liked and decided to keep! Well, why not?

I don't know by what standards this little poem could be considered mediocre. It's about the only two-liner I know of that has persisted in the canon for almost a century, and it's still worth discussing for many reasons. Its stature as an interesting artifact of early Modernism strikes me as secondary to its intrinsic interest, though it is of course hard to separate the poem from its milieu.

[David Landrum]

Originally posted by Kate Benedict:
I tend to agree. Another mediocre quasi-poem that has mysteriously become canonical and therefore students are exposed to it.

I object! I think that poem is a masterpiece. Its simplicity and the implied metaphor--the faces of poeple seen in in subway station are like leaves or petals on a flowering tree--is brilliant. And "apparition" suggests that the narrator is suffering loss and seeing the face of the beloved in the numerous faces of the metro.

I believe Pound was influenced at that time by Chinese poetry at the time and tried to work the indirect qualities of that particular type of poetry into his own writing. And I think he succeeds at it in this poem. It's a good example of a poem that is evocative though not discursive.

[Daniel Haar]

David, I agree. While much of Pound is overrated, I think "In a Station of the Metro" is just wonderful. One can only wish he took the same radical chopping method to his Cantos.