Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was an American poet, critic, and editor and a major figure of the early modernist movement. Though he was born in Hailey, Idaho, it wasn’t until he moved to Europe in 1908 that he published several books of poetry and found success. In the early twentieth century, while working in London as a foreign editor for several American literary magazines, Pound heralded a modernist movement in English and American literature, helping to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. Pound moved to Italy after World War I, where his pro-Fascist broadcasts and publications led to his arrest by American forces in 1945 and more than a decade of incarceration. His most famous works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–1969), some sections of which he wrote in prison.

In a Station of the Metro

Published in January 1913 in the magazine Poetry, “In a Station of the Metro” describes Pound’s experience in a Paris subway (called the Metro) station.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

(1913)