1

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberly

"Vocat aestus in umbram"1
-Nemesianus Es. IV.

E. P. Ode pour l'élection de Son Sépulchre

For three years, out of key with his time,

He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start --
…
II.
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries

Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,

Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema2, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

A Table

A Table. A Table means does it not my

dear it means a whole steadiness.
It is likely that a change. A Table
means more than a glass
even a looking glass is tall.

1
The heat calls us into the shade. From the Eclogues of the 3rd century Carthaginian poet Nemesianus
2
Movement (Gr.), and early spelling of cinema
 2

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under

his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

---through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage3 is my flower that splits
the rocks.

3
any of a genus (Saxifraga) of chiefly perennial plants of the saxifrage family, with small white, yellow,
purple, or pinkish flowers, and with leaves massed usually at the base of the plant
 3

Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Eliot in East Coker (part V) announces the demise of High Modernism:

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning…”
 4

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.