I have to confess that it was quite difficult to find a topic to relate the poets that we have seen in class. However, one day I was surfing online and I found something that called my attention.

Everyone knows that how technology has consumed our lives making us more like "robots" instead of people has been a topic discussed nowadays. A few days ago I watched a video called “How The Blind See Beauty” and it basically shows how blind people experience life and beauty. Then, I remembered another video for a mineral water company called "Cachantun" in which there are lots of people using cellphones and some laptops. Suddenly, a man who is waiting for the subway in Valparaíso drops his cellphone and when the doors open he gets mesmerized by a woman. At the end, they start talking while the rest are still on their phones.

Taking into account those videos I make a connection with the Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro”. As we saw in class, Pound had a vision while he was waiting for the subway; he realized that the people around him were beautiful and that experience was so faster that it was disappearing, like a photo shot. We also talked about his belief that people are trained to see art so in that sense the things are not beautiful anymore because of our way of appreciate them. He believed that the more similar to reality, the more beautiful the things are, or in other words, that beauty is everywhere if we pay attention.

Following this idea, there is a clear way to connect him with modernism since poets at that time wanted to highlight the reality and the life of the common man, being “more real than realism”. Pound, as a clear representative of modernism, saw beauty in something real and common, like a trip in a subway, showing that the rest of the people were “blind” because they ignored how gorgeous they are.

After stating that, I think he was visionary, since our society is pretty similar to what he saw in his time. I believe people are much blinder that them. We are so busy in our daily life posting comments on Facebook or talking with friends through Whatssap that we ignore what happens around us. As Pound believes, we are so trained by society that beauty is in the best clothes, the most advanced technology, etc., that the rest is left aside. This is something that I can actually see in Metro Valparaíso . Every day when I come back home I would say that almost everybody is either using their cellphones or listening to music, excepting for some children and elderly people. Teenagers and adults ignore pregnant women, the elderly ones and people with disabilities. Nobody cares about the other ones, if something happens inside a wagon, many of them would record it instead of helping, etc. We are so anesthetized and our lifes have turned into something so empty that we are not able to see beauty around us.

That shows me how visionary Pound was and how our society has not changed since those times.

What do you think? Have you experienced something similar? Can you create another example of how we can connect Pound's poems with our lives?

Here you have the videos and of course, "In the station of the metro".