Final answer:
Ezra Pound wrote 'In a Station of the Metro' as an attempt to encapsulate in words the striking emotional impact he experienced upon seeing a succession of beautiful faces in a Paris metro station, resulting in a work that is emblematic of Imagist poetry.
Step-by-step explanation:
Ezra Pound's inspiration for writing In a Station of the Metro seems to emerge from his profound experience of seeing a series of beautiful faces at La Concorde metro station in Paris. The phrases "saw suddenly a beautiful face", and "tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me", suggest a searching for expression and an attempt to capture a fleeting moment of beauty. Pound's struggle to find the perfect words that were as "lovely as that sudden emotion" indicates the depth of his experience and the challenge he faced in conveying it.
As a major figure in the modernist movement, Pound challenged poetic traditions with his explorations in form and style, exemplified in In a Station of the Metro, where he distilled his experience into a concise two-line poem with vivid Imagist language. The Imagist poem expresses his aesthetic directly, eliminating superfluous words and using rhythm to enhance the emotional feeling of the poem.