Simply Ezra
Randolph Chilton and Carol Gilbertson, both college professors whom are considered to be top Ezra Pound researchers, published the article “Pound’s “‘Metro’ Hokku”: The Evolution of an Image” in an attempt to understand the concise poem’s place within the imagist movement. The article articulates that Pound’s poem, “In a Station of the Metro” was reaching a monumental status within the poet’s collected work as the shining example of imagism. The authors present readers with original printings and various revisions of the poem in order to help prove Pound’s diligent and deliberate work on this poem.
The most drastic change in the short poem’s form was the end of the first stanza. Originally, and in many revised copies, the punctuation separating the two ideas was a colon; it was in the fall 1916 issue of Lustra in which the punctuation was switched to a semicolon. It may have been a misread by an editor, or as the authors suggest, Pound most likely labored intensely over each minute detail of his tidy imagist poem.
Early Version
The change meant the furthered separation of the two images. The authors claim that Pound’s poem traces “the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself…inward and subjective” (Chilton 231). This new structure presented the poem as two clusters of nouns, two images, separated, rather than mixed. Chilton and Gilbertson describe the semicolon use as the poet guarding his intellectual activity during his experience at the metro. Pound, with the editing of one simple piece of punctuation styled is poem more like that of a western haiku that followed the imagist criteria.
Final Version
In the work’s earlier stages, Chilton and Gilbertson show how the spacing of the condensed words varied. The article argues that Pound underwent a stylistic change in which he began to group words together based not on rhythm, but rather based on the relation of ideas. The authors claim that Pound’s move was to think “more theoretically about the relationship of a visual and emotional reality reflected in the poetic form he discovers” (Chilton 228). This fundamentally radical understanding of poetry is in accord with Gertrude Stein’s idea that poetry needs to attempt to capture reality similar to the mode of a painter; Pound’s poem, the authors argue, is more the poet finding “language in colour.” The semicolon was not merely a move for a new form, but the authors claim that Pound’s multiple revisions reveal the “evolution of his genuinely modernist poetic” (Chilton 232). Pound was a vanguard of imagism and with this work he would display a transition in the application of recognized literary norms.
Great overview of this article; when the poem’s in question are so seemingly slight, and the author’s so heavily invested in the aesthetic principles that ground them, it’s not surprise that pound would have been so exacting in his revisions and decision when it comes to the famous “Metro” poem. Great critical post! So much depends upon a semicolon (apparently).