To Waken An Old Lady

“In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound (1913)

Perhaps Ezra Pound’s most famous stand-alone poem, “In a Station of the Metro” exemplifies the Imagist aesthetic to which both Pound and Williams are committed. Published in 1913 in Poetry Magazine, the radical openness of the poem’s form and its shockingly short length defined the project of Imagism to a wider audience. While much of Pound’s later work is defined by its complex web of allusions and influences, this poem shows where he and William Carlos Williams intersected in terms of literary craft.

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922)

This unmatched masterwork of High Modernism was published by American/English poet T. S. Eliot in 1922. While William Carlos Williams respected Eliot’s skill, the publication of this masterpiece had a big and not particularly positive impact on the poet’s career. As Williams later wrote in his Autobiography, he “felt at once that [the publication of The Waste Land] had set me back twenty years.” For Williams, Eliot’s poem reaffirmed the power of highly learned and academic poetry, while Williams sought a pared-down poetry of every-day speech. In this way, Eliot’s masterwork stands as an example of precisely what Williams strove to subvert in the poetic establishment.