Personal Statement Program: 20th Century American Literature
“The apparition of these faces in the crowds: /Petals on a wet, black bough.” My first reaction on reading Ezra Pound’s 1916 poem In a Station of the Metro was that of outrage. Is it a poem by any definition? If it is a poem, how is it to be interpreted and understood? And finally, what are the implications that this poem has produced for the twentieth- century American literature?
My initial bewilderment subsided as I realized that there must a raison d’etre behind this apparently bizarre literary phenomenon. What I should do is to put this poem into the context of the American literary evolution and literary history. At least, the poem raises an important challenge. It requires me to understand some of the crucial changes that must be happening around the turn of the last century.
My subsequent studies indicate that this poem represents part of the larger literary movement known as Imagism, which included such theorists and practitioners as T. E. Hume, Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, etc. The movement was a direct reaction to the late Victorian poetry, which had become extremely artificial, emptily “rhetorical” and “ornamental”. To address such problems, it was necessary to loosen the metrical pattern and bring it back closer to the rhythms of ordinary speech. Consequently, the “imagist” movement had a great deal to do with promoting experiments with free verse, advocating among many creeds the need “to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject” and “to produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.” When Archibald MacLeish said in his Ars Poetica (1926) that “A poem should not mean / But be”, he had similar concerns in his mind. Imagism, minor as it is as a literary movement, triggered imp
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