After reading through some of Ezra Pound’s poetry I have learned one thing in particular: I do not really enjoy reading Ezra Pound’s poetry. As I’ve said before, Ezra Pound impresses me more with his ability to find talented writers than he does with his own work. I appreciate everything he has contributed to poetry and how much of an influence he was on the modernist movement, however I am simply not a huge fan of his work, especially the very hard to digest cantos. The fact that I don’t really enjoy reading his cantos is most likely more my fault than it is his own, however. They are some of the most confusing poems I have ever read and it doesn’t help when plenty of them are in another language and at least one is a piece of sheet music. As a rule, I also simply prefer prose to poetry any day of the week anyway so maybe it wasn’t the best idea to pick one of the more complex and slightly convoluted poets out there. I really enjoyed the poem “In the Station of a Metro” a lot, however, as it seems to be a variation of a haiku that really manages to capture the sort of dreary feeling of a rainy, dark metro station beautifully in a mere two lines. The first line, which compares the faces of the people to apparitions, helps capture the feeling of a bleak perspective of people in dark raincoats and pale faces that look like ghosts. The second line, which compares the faces with petals on a wet black tree branch, made me think of Van Gogh’s painting of the blossoming almond tree, only much darker and of course wetter. It actually became clear to me that I appreciate his shorter poetry much more than I do his longer cantos, although that may simply be due to me not being able to fully comprehend his cantos.