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Overview
“In a Station of the Metro” is a short poem that the American poet Ezra Pound first published in 1913
. Clocking in at just fourteen words, the poem juxtaposes faces in a crowd with petals on a wet branch. Pound’s radical economy of language makes it a chief example of Imagism, a modernist movement that sought to strip away all ornamentation to reveal a single image—or scene—with crystalline clarity. Yet with its reference to the autumn season and its lack of verbs, the poem also draws on the Japanese tradition of the haiku.Read the free full text, a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of key poetic devices from “In a Station of the Metro.”
