The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [79]
Subway Reading
Let’s consider one of the most anthologized and analyzed of all twentieth-century poems in English, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” The poem is very brief—two lines—which makes it ideal for close reading. But as will be immediately evident, not every reading is close in the sense of attention to form.
Take, for example, the question of the text of the poem, which you might think would be, if not an easy, then at least a resolvable question. But in fact that is not the case. In its earliest printing, in Poetry magazine on June 6, 1913, the poem was printed this way:
Shortly thereafter, in T.P.’s Weekly for June 1913, Pound published another version of the poem:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
And in his collection of poetry called Lustra (1916), the poem appears in a similar form, except the colon at the end of the first line has been changed to a semicolon.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
This is how the poem is almost always printed today. Pound commented extensively on its genesis and offered detailed (and changing) instructions for its proper punctuation.12 The existence of these varied versions, each with its printing provenance and with the attached explanatory comments of the poet, constitute a good example of what is now known as genetic criticism, the history of drafts and versions or, as its proponents call them, avanttextes or pretexts.13 Pretty clearly, the difference in spacing and punctuation will influence both the performative reading of the poem (how is it spoken aloud? with what pauses and emphases?) and also, potentially, its meaning. But we have begun with the problem of establishing the text, and the text here is already, even in a demonstrably modern era, one of many variants, each sanctioned by the author, with an explanation, in some cases, of his intentions and of the effect, or affect, he expects the poem to produce. The first version of the poem was thirty lines long; later the two-line text modeled on the Japanese haiku derived from it.
Almost every account of this short and brilliant poem alludes, at some point, to Pound’s evolutionary description of how he came to write it:
Three years ago in Paris I got out of a “metro” train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation … not in speech, but in little splotches of color …
Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter must have pigments or shades more numerous than the existing names of the colors.
Perhaps this is enough to explain the words in my “Vortex”:—
“Every concept, every emotion, presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form.”
In these ruminations published in 1916, Pound went on to discuss the haiku (spelled hokku in his text):
The “one-image poem” is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work “of second intensity.” Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the