The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [80]
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.”
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.14
Here is the author, front and center, naming his poem’s genre (hokku-like; “one-image poem”), explaining its moment of origin, its visual inspiration, its title, its poetic progress from thirty lines to fifteen to two. To read the poem, must one read this account or know of it? And if so, do we have to believe it? What authority does the author have?
Many critics, contemplating “In a Station of the Metro,” have zeroed in on the word apparition, which stands out from all the others in that it is multisyllabic, Latinate, abstract, conceptual as well as visual. Several have detected a mythological substrate, indebted to classical literature’s descents to the underworld (“apparition” + “faces in the crowd” = shades of the dead, whether experienced by Orpheus, Odysseus, or Aeneas). Some recent commentators have singled out the poem’s ethnopoetics,15 and at least one, close reading Pound’s account of the poem’s origin, has seen the “foundational cluster beauty / woman / child / lovely /[poetry]” as posing a feminist conundrum: “One idea is that beauty / the feminine matters in the construction of poetry; the other is that it does not.”16
If one did not have in hand Pound’s autobiographical account, would it be tempting to imagine that the faces were flashing by on a moving train, rather than being glimpsed on the station platform, as he seems to describe them? And if one had never heard of haiku, would it matter? What if this were the first one-image poem the reader encountered? How much background or generic context is necessary to read a poem? And if we wanted, for any reason, to read against Pound’s authority rather than in obedience to it, what might that mean?
Pound calls it a one-image poem, but arguably, it is a two-image poem, if one counts the title. Suppose we did not have the title phrase—or if he had excised the title in a further editorial moment? Without that situational marker, which anchors the perception in modernity and in urban space, the two lines might be read quite differently. If we were to compare the poem to, for example, some fragments of ancient verse, recognized as fragmentary, unrecoverable as wholes, what would that do to the poem? Pound famously collaborated with T. S. Eliot in assembling The Waste Land, with its paradigmatic assertion that “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In his account of the genesis of the “Metro” poem, Pound claims that “the image is itself the speech”—that images are not “ornaments.” But is the title part of the image? Or is it an ornament?
Another well-known modern instance of an author severely cutting a poem for a similar tightening effect is Marianne Moore’s decision to reduce her poem “Poetry” from five stanzas to three lines—a distilled version of the three lines that began the original poem.
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
These revisions were accepted as canonical—i.e., as the author’s version of the poem—when Moore’s collected poetry was published in 1967, but when facsimiles of the (out-of-print) 1924 volume Observations came under review by scholars, debates ensued about whether the editorial changes Moore introduced should be regarded as improvements. In any case, the two poems called “Poetry” are formally and textually quite different, and the shorter of the two does not contain one of Moore’s most famous and most quoted phrases, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
It is not uncommon for works of literature, whether in verse or in prose, to exist in more than one version. I mention it here because the question of reading may be thought, naturally enough, to involve reading a