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Hugh Selwyn Mauberley | Introduction

Ezra Pound’s 1920 poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” is a landmark in the career of the great American modernist poet. In the poem, Pound uses two alter egos to discuss the first twelve years of his career, a period during which aesthetic and literary concerns fully engaged Pound’s attention. The poem reconstructs literary London of the Edwardian period, recreating the dominant feeling about what literature should be and also describing Pound’s own rebellious aesthetic beliefs. The poem also takes us to the catastrophe of the early twentieth century, World War I, and bluntly illustrates its effects on the literary world. The poem then proceeds to an “envoi,” or a send-off, and then to five poems told through the eyes of a second alter ego.

In the first section of the poem, Pound portrays himself as “E. P.,” a typical turn-of-the-century aesthete, and then in the second he becomes “Mauberley,” an aesthete of a different kind. Both E. P. and Mauberley are facets of Pound’s own character that, in a sense, the poem is meant to exorcise. After composing this poem, Pound left London for Paris and, soon after, for Italy, where his view of his role as a poet changed dramatically. No longer would his work be primarily concerned with aesthetics; after 1920, he started to concentrate on writing The Cantos and on studying politics and economics. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” is not just Pound’s farewell to London; it is Pound’s definitive good-bye to his earlier selves.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Summary

E.P. Ode pour l’election de son sepulchre
The first section of this long sequence introduces the reader to almost all of the themes and content of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” The displacement of Pound’s own self into a persona, the allusions to literary history, the foreign phrases: all of these typical Poundian elements appear in this first poem.

The section’s title means “E. P. Ode for the Selection of His Tomb” (an allusion to the French poet Ronsard) and this section is, in a sense, a eulogy for “E. P.,” Pound’s aesthete alter ego. Written like most of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” in quatrains (four-line stanzas), this section tells of E. P., who “strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry” by means of resurrecting the old idea of “‘the sublime’.” The poem’s subject is clearly based on Pound himself, “born / In a half savage country” (Pound was born in Idaho). In this section, E. P. is an aspiring artist, admiring Flaubert (who, famously, pursued “le mot juste,” or the exact word, and sought to create an art that was all style and no content) and “unaffected by ‘the march of events.’” The portrait of E. P. is of an erudite, welleducated, classically-steeped aesthete: the very model of the late Victorian poet. Yet we already know that this E. P. will die, for he “passed from men’s memory” in his thirty-first year (the French quote is from Pound’s idol Francois Villon, and the reference is to the profound change in Pound’s poetry that occurred in his thirty-first year).

II
The second section moves away from the subject of Pound himself and attempts to describe the artistic scene in London in the early 1900s. “The age demanded,” Pound tells us, merely images; the age will settle for “mendacities” (lies) rather than the “classics in paraphrase” (this reference is to the hostility that greeted Pound’s loose translation of Sextus Propertius’s Latin lyric poems). Many art lovers in London in the 1910s were interested in art that was outwardly attractive but not deeply beautiful, immediately pleasing but not enduringly rewarding. Contrasting a “prose kinema” (i.e., versions of primitive movies told in literature) to alabaster (one of the most beautiful materials used in classical sculpture), Pound asserts that “the age demanded” the former. One of the primary themes of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” is the difference between art that aspires only to outer beauty and art that aims at profundity. In the early poems, Pound portrays E. P. as a figure only too happy to pursue shallowness in art and the cheap reproduction of what has worked before.

III
In the third section, Pound details objects that “tasteful” people appreciated in the 1910s. Much of this section is simply contrast: Pound contrasts a typical artifact of Edwardian London with a legendary classical object and wants the reader to understand the cheapness of the former. He contrasts a “tea-rose tea-gown” with the legendary gauzy fabric produced by the Greek island of Cos and the pianola (a player-piano) with the legendary lyre on which the Greek poet Sappho composed her verse.

As the section progresses, Pound begins to forward some explanations for this “tawdry cheapness” that characterizes his age. Capitalism and Christianity, he feels, have eaten away at the great- ness and authenticity of classical culture. He compares the “maceration” (wasting away of the body, as by extreme fasting) of Christ’s body in the communion sacrament to the festivals of wine and music that honored the Greek god Dionysus, and states that Caliban (the savage slave in Shakespeare’s Tempest) has replaced Ariel (a fairy in the same play). In the fourth stanza Pound states that “beauty” in ancient Greek, is “decreed in the market place.” This section bemoans the cheapness that capitalism and the melodrama of Christianity have brought to culture.

IV
The fourth section takes readers from the parlors of early twentieth-century London to the muddy battlefields of World War I. This section’s main thrust is that the slaughter of the war was perpetuated by lies and by the intentional deceits perpetrated by politicians and the wealthy. Focusing on why young men would volunteer to fight, Pound identifies several varieties of self-delusion. Some of the men fought “pro domo,” or “for home”; some fought because they sought adventure; some because they wanted glory; some because they feared ridicule; and some just because they were disposed to violence. Nowhere in this poem does Pound mention the kinds of soldiers that politicians and generals talk about: young men who are willing to give up their lives for abstract concepts defined and defended by those in power.

After listing the reasons some went to war, Pound describes the war’s effects. He alludes to Horace’s famous line about patriotism, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country) and angrily denies it: “non ‘dulce’ non ‘et decor’. . . / walked eye-deep in hell.” Pound tersely illustrates the conditions of trench warfare and angrily attacks the “old men’s lies” that caused so many to die.

V
Although it is short, this section may be Pound’s most well-known from this poem. In its eight lines, Pound bitterly states that there was no point to the war, that even if the war was, as the “old men” of section IV said, a sacred effort to defend civilization as we know it, civilization’s defense was not worth all of those deaths. In the end, Pound says, “a myriad” died “For an old [b——] gone in the... » Complete Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Summary