(1) It is one of Pound’s early poems, published in Lustra, in which Pound’s poems fall into two general groups: lyrics and satires. “In a Station of the Metro” belongs to the previous one that celebrates beauty, vitality, fertility and desires. It is a classic imagist poem with Haiku-like terseness, meter, and subject exemplified the Imagist principles that Pound was promulgating, “direct treatment of the ‘thing’, using words only contributes to the presentation, and preference of a sequence of musical rhythm but metronome”, with its epiphany of beauty in a crowded Paris underground-railway station. Pound’s metaphorical leap from luminescent faces to “petals on a wet, black bough” generates “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits” to which Imagist revelation aspires ( Eliot, 1954).

(2) As one of the predecessors of those in later came into published Cathay, Pound’s translation of Chinese and Japanese poems under the support of Ernest Fenollosa, “In a Station of the Metro” has tried to deliver a poem in an oriental way, to bring the pictographic concreteness through juxtaposing images and lines to ground in the familiar convention of a stable lyric voice with which the reader may identify. However, the condensation of the poem’s images and allusions, and the lack of persona, the reader is forced to construe unfamiliar, heterogeneous materials juxtaposed according to a logic that is not immediately apparent. “In a Station of the Metro” has nevertheless become the representative poem of Imagism movement, and a beautiful effort of combining western and eastern art.