Sumanyu Satpathy analyzes Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro along side W.B. Yeats’ poem The Two Trees in his essay “’Concealing the debt’: A note on Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’”. Satpathy argues that Pound chose the later of his (Pound) advice to “’Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it,’” believing that the last line of Pound’s poem is sourced from Yeats’ The Two Trees (55). Satpathy supports this claim by offering lines of Pound’s poetry that resemble line of Yeats poetry:
‘Gaze in thine own heart, / The holy tree is growing there’. [This line is echoed in Pound’s “A Girl”: ‘The Tree has grown in my breast’]…The line undoubtedly derive their power from all and sundry symbolist devices, but the last quoted line [‘broken branches, broken boughs and blackened leaves’] is certainly Imagist (56).
Here, Satpathy draws on the similarities in Pound and Yeats’ poetry to imply that Pound owes his imagist idea to Yeats because of the symbolism and pre-imagism present in The Two Trees. On the one hand, I agree with Satpathy’s suggestion that some of Pound’s poetics is inspired by Yeats because Pound was an innovator; he was focused on “[making] it new” and drew his ideas from other poets (346, Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry). On the other hand I disagree with Satpathy’s implication that Pound owes the ideas of imagism to Yeats. That would be similar to saying Yeats should be given credit for the poem “Metro” because it steamed form his idea. Although Pound drew inspiration from Yeats’ poetics, he took these ideas and reshaped them into something ordinary, seen in his poem In a Station of the Metro.
Satpathy goes further to assert that Pound borrow “wet black bough” from Yeats’ “broken boughs and blackened leaves” and that Pound uses William Blake’s image of heaven and hell in Metro where the first line represent paradise and the second represents hell. He believes the image of the “wet black bough” is “‘the gestalt of many, from the metro travelers to that of Kore in Hell in the underworld’.” Satpathy supports these claims by addressing a statement from Pound, “’It is only good manners if you repeat a few other men to at least do it better or more briefly’” (57). This I agree with because, as stated earlier, Pound is know for taking ideas and reshaping them into unique works of art, but what great poet doesn’t borrow from the success of ancestry, mimicking the very works they adore.
In short, I agree with this article but I do not find it necessary to acknowledge every poet borrowed from. In the Station of the Metro is a very unique poem that deserves credit for its originality outside of its connection to the inspiring works. This separation allows for more interpretation and allows the poem to be appreciated for its uniqueness.
This is an great post–very relevant for our conversation about imagism and symbolism (here, it seems Pound dervides a core impulse used in his imagist work from Yeats’s more fluid symbolist work) as well as the question of how the work of one poet migrates into the work of another (this is partly what Eliot’s essay on tradition is about). The heave / hell argument seems a bit off to me; I’d like to learn more about how the author reads “hell” into that final, still line. Excellent critical post!