BK. Ezra Pound

4. ‘How I Began’. T.P.’s Weekly, 6 June, 1913, p. 707.

Pound’s description of how he arrived at In a Station of the Metro (3) is well-known from his ‘Vorticism’ essay (12), but the discussion here precedes that work by fifteen months. He describes the scene in the Metro and his inability to capture it properly until ‘only the other night, wondering how I should tell the adventure, it struck me that in Japan where a work of art is not estimated by its acreage and where sixteen syllables [sic] are counted enough for a poem if you arrange and punctuate them properly, one might make a very little poem which would be translated about as follows:—The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough—And there, or in some other very old, very quiet civilisation, some one else might understand the significance’.