1

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

IN A STATION OF THE METROThe apparition of these faces in the crowd:Petals on a wet, black bough.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberly "Vocat aestus in umbram"1 -Nemesianus Es. IV.

E. P. Ode pour l'élection de Son Sépulchre

For three years, out of key with his time,He strove to resuscitate the dead artOf poetry; to maintain "the sublime"In the old sense. Wrong from the start --…II.The age demanded an imageOf its accelerated grimace,Something for the modern stage,Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveriesOf the inward gaze;Better mendacitiesThan the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,Made with no loss of time,A prose kinema2, not, not assuredly, alabasterOr the "sculpture" of rhyme.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946 )

A Table

A Table. A Table means does it not mydear it means a whole steadiness.It is likely that a change. A Tablemeans more than a glasseven a looking glass is tall.

1 The heat calls us into the shade. From the Eclogues of the 3rd century Carthaginian poet Nemesianus2 Movement (Gr.), and early spelling of cinema

2

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much dependsupon

a red wheelbarrow

glazed with rainwater

beside the whitechickens.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait underhis weedand the writingbe of words, slow and quick, sharpto strike, quiet to wait,sleepless.

---through metaphor to reconcilethe people and the stones.Compose. (No ideasbut in things) Invent!Saxifrage3 is my flower that splitsthe rocks.

3 any of a genus (Saxifraga) of chiefly perennial plants of the saxifrage family, with small white, yellow, purple, or pinkish flowers, and with leaves massed usually at the base of the plant

3

Wallace Stevens ( 1879 - 1955)

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of findingWhat will suffice. It has not always hadTo find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script.

Then the theatre was changedTo something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about warAnd it has to find what will suffice. It hasTo construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, And, like an insatiable actor, slowly andWith meditation, speak words that in the ear,In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the soundOf which, an invisible audience listens,Not to the play, but to itself, expressedIn an emotion as of two people, as of twoEmotions becoming one. The actor isA metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that givesSounds passing through sudden rightnesses, whollyContaining the mind, below which it cannot descend,Beyond which it has no will to rise.

It mustBe the finding of a satisfaction, and mayBe of a man skating, a woman dancing, a womanCombing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Eliot in East Coker (part V) announces the demise of High Modernism:

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—Trying to learn to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning…”

4

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,On a white heal-all, holding up a mothLike a white piece of rigid satin cloth --Assorted characters of death and blightMixed ready to begin the morning right,Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?What brought the kindred spider to that height,Then steered the white moth thither in the night?What but design of darkness to appall?--If design govern in a thing so small.