Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses.

Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called "usury". He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. During World War II and the Holocaust in Italy, he made hundreds of paid radio broadcasts for the Italian government, including in German-occupied Italy, attacking the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Great Britain, international finance, munitions makers and mongers, and Jews, among others, as causes, abettors and prolongers of the world war, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos that were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy. After a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and lived in Italy until his death in 1972. His economic and political views have ensured that his life and work remain controversial.

In the following image, the observer views “petals on a wet, black bough,” which is to say they are looking at the leaves of a tree, likely following rainfall. In this image, the reader is presented with the idea of small, fleeting, and weak elements of beauty within the natural world. It is difficult to describe the feeling of appreciation of a transient natural phenomenon, which is likely why Pound chose this particular image — to stand in for a feeling that can’t be easily described.

The first image of ‘In a Station of the Metro’ is entirely constructed by humans, and the second one is entirely a phenomenon of the natural world. The relationship between the two ideas is an abstract one, but by pairing them together, Pound seems to be suggesting that there is that specific kind of beauty in the station of a metro, and that the fleeting apparitions of people drifting through is no different than the wilting nature of a petal stuck to a wet tree. The petal weathers, the petal is rained on, and eventually, that petal wilts and dies, just like each person entering and leaving the view of the author.

In the first line of ‘L’Art’ the speaker begins by introducing arsenic. It is a highly poisonous naturally occurring element that is widely distributed throughout the world. It is commonly used as a poison and it can also be used as a green dye, something that was done during the Victorian period and inevitably led to death through periods of prolonged exposure. The color green is placed on the “egg-white cloth”. It stands out there, as it’s meant to. The image should capture the reader’s attention for its purity and obvious implications. 

The reader can take their time and read deeply into each one of these lines. There are numerous questions one might ask, especially considering the title. Is the arsenic there for a purpose? Is it there simply for the artistic beauty of green on white, contrasted with red in the next line?

In the second line of ‘L’Art’ the speaker uses juxtaposition to place the color read, the opposite of green, next to it. There are “Crushed strawberries!” the speaker exclaims. The excitement in this line is clear with the use of an exclamation mark. The speaker does not say that “we” need to eat the strawberries or, thankfully, the arsenic. We should instead “feast our eyes” on them. We should enjoy the sight of the two colors and two very different items in conversation.

Pound is asking the reader to consider the value in the contrast and the juxtaposition. It should foster in the reader a reaction similar to that one has upon seeing a beautiful work of art.