The April 1913 issue of Poetry magazine contained this now-famous short poem by Ezra Pound:

In a Station of the Metro

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

This printing of the poem in the New Freewomanon 15 August is notable for reproducing Pound’s original spacing, an innovation he explained to Poetry editor Harriet Munroe in a letter of March 30^th: ‘In the ‘Metro’ hokku, I was careful, I think, to indicate spaces between the rhythmic units, and I want them observed’[i]. I imagine that the explanation was intended to overcome objections by either Munroe or her printer (or possibly both) to Pound’s irregular requirements, and that similar objections may be why the layout was dropped in all other printings of the poem.

Pound’s explanation is interesting in its echoing of the last of the three principles that…