The Gender and Politics of Imagism and Vorticism: Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

Abstract

Ezra Pound was a legendary modernist who initiates and develops Imagism and Vorticism. By discussing several critics’ arguments on Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” I examine early Pound’s poetics and poetry in terms of gender and politics. Through exploring Pound’s Imagism and Vorticism, I find that Pound’s conversion to fascism is closely related to his own poetics. Also in “In a Station of the Metro,” the image of “the crowd” is quite important in that “the crowd” seems to be ambivalent. The “crowd” represents, for Pound, the age of the masses. The crowd and the machine demand “a mould in plaster,” the mass production, making with “no loss of time.” The female sexuality strongly influences early Pound and, then, he starts his drift toward politics rooted in aestheticism. Finally, the gender structure determines Pound’s poetics and politics, and his phallic power comes to have a feminine reinforcement.