The most famous poem from the early twentieth-century movement known as Imagism. According to Pound, it was inspired by a moment he experienced while waiting for the subway in the Paris Underground. At first he “saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and another beautiful face.” At first he couldn’t put the moment into words, but after studying Japanese poetry (haiku) Pound found a means of condensing everything about it into a terse 19 syllables.
