One Image Evolves A Poem

Ezra Pound writes about the relationship between imagery and poetry with particular reference to the poem, "in a station of the metro" in the book Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916: "All poetic language is the language of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language."
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m...

In particular, Pound's observations of the creation of the metro poem provide other poets and readers with an insight of the delicacy and power of an image.

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 following hokku-like sentence: --
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough."
This poem echoes the tradition of Japanese haiku. Ironically, Imagist poet Ezra Pound profoundly intertwines western brashness with eastern simplicity, poem after poem.

For more poetry by Ezra Pound, click here: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrap...

Be inspired then write a poem!

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