Review of “In a Station of the Metro” (1913)
Ezra Pound (writer).
Read in 2022.
A lot of imagist poetry makes sense on its own, but Pound would spend years boiling down his experiences until the texts were so curt that they required explanation. In this case, Pound provided a perfectly good explanation in 1914, reproduced in Modern utländsk lyrik (1975). That explanation in prose clearly improves the experience of the poem, removing its ambiguity. I do not feel that it undermines the choice of brevity, but it does undermine any attempt to present the poem alone, uncurated.
References here: “La Jetée” (1962), Modern utländsk lyrik (1975/1985).