Ezra Pound

In response to comments on the length of yesterday's poem, today's poem by Ezra Pound is considerably shorter.

This philosophy influenced poet Ezra Pound noted the power of haiku's brevity and juxtaposed images. He wrote, "The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language." The influence of haiku on Pound is most evident in his poem "In a Station of the Metro," which began as a thirty-line poem, but was eventually pared down to two lines:

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

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A traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen
syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count. Often focusing on images
from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of
expression.

Haiku began in thirteenth-century Japan as the opening phrase of renga,
an oral poem, generally 100 stanzas long, which was also composed
syllabically. The much shorter haiku broke away from renga in the
sixteenth-century, and was mastered a century later by Matsuo Basho,
who wrote this classic haiku:

An old pond!
A frog jumps in--
the sound of water.

Haiku was traditionally written in the present tense and focused on
associations between images. There was a pause at the end of the first or
second line, and a "season word," or kigo, specified the time of year.
As the form has evolved, many of these rules--including the 5/7/5
practice--have been routinely broken. However, the philosophy of haiku
has been preserved: the focus on a brief moment in time; a use of
provocative, colorful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a
sense of sudden enlightenment and illumination.
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More about Pound:

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of
college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from
Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years,
he traveled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary
executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in
Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and
became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to
Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in
Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when
he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist
propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War.

In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to
St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement,
the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included
a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook
Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic
achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948).
After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the
hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice,
where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.