Personal Statement
Program: 20th Century American Literature
“The apparition of these faces in the crowds: /Petals on a wet, black bough.” My first reaction on reading Ezra Pound”s 1916 poem In a Station of the Metro was that of outrage. Is it a poem by any definition? If it is a poem, how is it to be interpreted and understood? And finally, what are the implications that this poem has produced for the twentieth- century American literature?
My initial bewilderment subsided as I realized that there must a raison d”etre behind this apparently bizarre literary phenomenon. What I should do is to put this poem into the context of the Amer
