In 1912, Ezra Pound stepped off a train at Paris's La Concorde metro station and, by his own account, saw a sudden succession of beautiful faces in the crowd — an experience he tried, and failed, to capture in a thirty-line poem. Over the following year he cut it down, first to half that length, then further, until what remained was two lines. That poem, "In a Station of the Metro," became one of the founding texts of Imagism, a movement built on the idea that most poems could be improved mainly by removing words from them.
What Imagism actually demanded
Imagism, which emerged among a small circle of English-language poets around 1912-1917 including Pound, H.D., and Amy Lowell, set out a small number of stated principles that read almost like a discipline of subtraction: use the exact word rather than a merely decorative one, create new rhythms rather than reusing old ones, and — most distinctively — treat the image itself, the concrete visual thing being presented, as the entire content of the poem, rather than as decoration wrapped around an explained idea or sentiment. Imagist poems tended to be short, precise, and to avoid telling the reader what to feel about what was being shown, trusting the juxtaposition of clear images to do the emotional work instead of explanation.
Two lines, one juxtaposition, no explanation
Pound's finished poem reads: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." It never says the faces were beautiful, or fleeting, or that the comparison to petals means anything in particular — it simply places the crowd of faces against the image of petals on a wet branch and lets the reader do the work of connecting them. Pound later described his year of revision as a process almost entirely of deletion: he said he "resolved to the language of hard light, clear edges" by removing everything that didn't need to be there, treating the reduction from thirty lines to two not as a poem getting shorter but as a poem getting closer to what it was actually about.
What we're still unsure about
Pound's own account of the poem's composition — thirty lines, then fifteen, then the final two, over roughly a year — comes from his own later retelling, and like many poets' accounts of their own creative process, it's a compelling story that isn't independently verifiable in every specific detail, including the exact intermediate drafts, which don't survive. Literary historians also still debate exactly how much of Imagism's aesthetic Pound originated himself versus absorbed from other sources he was reading and translating at the time, particularly classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, whose compression and reliance on unexplained juxtaposed images strongly prefigures what Imagism later formalised as a Western movement.
This sits inside Modernist & Imagist Poetry, one of seven topics in Poetry, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.