In a Station of the Metro

Published in April 1913 in the literary magazine Poetry, “In a Station of the Metro” is an Imagist poem. In it, Pound describes a single moment in an underground Paris metro in 1912. The poem is considered the first haiku in English despite it lacking a traditional haiku’s three-line, 17-syllable form. The poem consists of only 14 words. Pound uses an equation rather than a description to place the faces of the passersby into the poem. The poem is considered a quintessential Imagist text and is often celebrated and studied because of its brevity and compact structure. In 1917, the poem appeared in Pound’s collection Lustra. In 1926, it reappeared in an anthologized version of this work titled The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. Some consider the poem a piece of Modernist work since it attempts to break from pentameter and use visual spacing. The poem also does not contain any verbs. Originally, a different spacing appeared between the groups of words, and this version can still be found in the April 1913 edition of Poetry.

Poet Biography

Born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho Territory, Ezra Pound was the only son of Homer Pound, registrar of the General Land Office, and Isabel Weston.