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Austin Butler
09-11-2011, 01:28 PM
I was at at a lecture on the use of images and visual space in poetry and we looked at this example of Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" originally published in 1913:

The apparition-------of these faces-------in the crowd---:
Petals------on a wet, black----bough---.

(Dashes have been used to maintain the integrity of the spacing. The poem as it actually stands can be found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/1878)

Apparently this kind of spacing was common in Pound's early poems and they were "corrected" with Pound's permission in his later years of ill mental health. Are there are any collections of his uncorrected poems out there?

Loganm
09-11-2011, 02:03 PM
Pound was known for typing out multiple spaces between words even while writing criticism and prose. You can see some of this in his Browning and Golding selections in ABC. I really don't think it matters at all. No collections exist.

Austin Butler
09-11-2011, 03:24 PM
Thanks for the reply Logan. However, I'm not familiar with Browning and Golding or ABC. Who/what are/is they/it? Thanks again.

Loganm
09-11-2011, 08:47 PM
ABC of Reading by Pound. The first half being his literary theories, the second half are selections that he believes are the best in their category. He selected the poets Arthur Golding and Robert Browning, and puts varying amount of spaces between words and the reason he gives is to help the reader catch the tempo. Something like that.

JBI
09-11-2011, 09:07 PM
He is trying too hard to be "Oriental" in my opinion. he had this wacky idea that he could create images out of associations of words into groups the same way he believed Chinese characters were composed (not in reality, as though a fraction were originally formed that way, they have never been read that way). That is generally what I see him trying to do here, though it is an early stage, so he is more or less experimenting with the idea. Still this one is published as two blocks of text, not disjointed like his other works.