> if it is any Metro it can be every Metro

Exactly.


> but it may well have been planted in his mind by one particular Metro, in
> Paris naturally because of his title? In the universal sense it is 'every'
> Metro but but but

Prefer not to think of poet's mind as potting soil. ;-)


> can you expand on your comment
> > The awakening described in The Tree opened Pound to the underworld of
> > recurrent types.
>
> E gad it seems a strange paring of The Tree with the Metro poem?

There is indeed a connection between the phenomenon of the epiphany which is
described in The Tree and the phenomonen in which "these faces in the crowd"
present themselves to the poet as "petals on a wet, black bough".  What
unites the two ostensibly different locales (wood and metro) is their
underworldly nature.  Both metro and wood are darkish places where strange
things happen.  The Tree is the ur-statement of this underworldly mode of
perception, though it informs many of the poems from Pound's early period.

>
> en passant, Eliot wrote a general comment about these shorter poems
stating
> that the feeling/mood is more interesting than the writing
> & with an embellished dictate: "In the perfect poem both are equally
> interesting, and being equally interesting are interesting as one thing
and
> not as two." Isn't that a flipping marvellous piece of aesthetic
theorising
> or whatever one might call it? Excuse lengthy email.

Pound is searching for two things in these early poems:  a self, and a
voice. When self and voice coincide, we have a perfection. When either of
them is being tried on or tried out, like a new hat, we have dramatic
posturing.  PERSONAE.

Tim Romano