Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by Ezra Pound

First published: 1920

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The American poet Ezra Pound had been living in Europe for more than a decade when he published his first major work, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In London, Pound became professionally acquainted with many of the leading artists and intellectuals, including the novelists Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford; the critic T. E. Hulme; poets T. S. Eliot, Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell, and John Gould Fletcher; and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound also met Henry James and helped the Anglo-Irish poet W. B. Yeats hone a fresh style for what many saw to be the new age of literature. In addition to writing poetry, Pound was active as an editor for such innovative literary magazines as Poetry, Egoist, and Blast. Among his lasting contributions are Imagism and the experimentation with free verse.

Pound was in a unique position to bear painful witness to two equally devastating phenomena. The first was the utter indifference with which society at large greeted the efforts of young people to improve human values and perceptions through their art. The second phenomenon was World War I. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a double-edged indictment of that war, which changed everything, and of the poets and the artists who failed to change anything. Nevertheless, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is also that very thing whose absence the poet mourns—a poetry that has the courage to present a true report without forsaking beauty.

The first three sections of the poem rely heavily on allusions to the classical age of Homeric Greece to establish a stark contrast between past and contemporary expectations of art and the artist. Pound emphasizes this point further through the dashed expectations of his alter ego, Mauberley. Pound later told a correspondent, “I am no more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock. . . . Mauberley is a mere surface.” Still, Pound’s dedication to the poem indicates it is “an ode for the choice of his [own] tomb,” and like Pound, who was born in Idaho, Mauberley is an American “born/ in a half savage country.” As an alter ego, Mauberley most likely represents a former self who failed by setting himself the unachievable goal “to resuscitate the dead art/ Of poetry.”

Mauberley is not wrong to aim so high, the poet tells us, but he compares it to trying to wring “lilies from the acorn.” Thus, he eventually becomes lost and forgotten in his own aesthetic subtleties, just as Homer’s Odysseus got wrapped up in the “elegance of Circe’s hair.” In any case, the “age demanded” other things from its artists, “an image/ Of its accelerated grimace/ / . . . a mould in plaster,/ Made with no loss of time.” While artists labored fruitlessly at what the age regarded as meaningless nothings, “a tawdry cheapness” set the standard for public taste, and the classical vitality of Sappho, Dionysus, and the Faun was replaced by “a knave or an eunuch” hypocritically mouthing Christian pieties until, instead of the crowning laurel for the heroes and gods of old, there was but a “tin wreath.”

All of this would be nothing more than the commonplaces of social criticism that poets have, since time immemorial, leveled at their ages were it not for the witheringly real intervention of World War I. It is to the bitter ironies of that event that the poet directs his attention in parts 4 and 5. “These fought in any case,” he writes in stark terms, and yet for what did they fight and die. Amid the melodrama of Mauberley’s failures and of the age’s cheapness of mind and values there was only “wastage as never before,” and now when the poet quotes from the classics it is to remind his readers that to die for one’s country is neither fitting nor sweet if that nation is the contemporary England (or France, Germany, or the United States) that was described in parts 2 and 3.

In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound discards the free verse techniques he developed in the preceding decade, returning in parts 1 through 3 to the traditional quatrain. In parts 4 and 5, though, as if to underscore the failure of poetry to prevent the war and at the same time to display poetry’s ability to mirror the war’s catastrophe, Pound resorts to free verse and to the compression of Imagism in describing such sights as the bodies left to rot in the no-man’s-lands of trench warfare: “laughter out of dead bellies.”

Ironically, then, the very poem that laments Mauberley’s failure to resuscitate the dead art of poetry brings that art back to life as a tool for commenting on a “botched” civilization’s failure to live up to its own ideals: “There died a myriad,/ / For two gross of broken statues,/ For a few thousand battered books.” The relationship between this climax and the remainder of the poem, which continues for another eight sections, is simply that they repeat parts 1 through 3 by reviewing the circumstances by which a civilization betrayed its artists, and the artists betrayed the service of conscience they owed their civilization.

The Pre-Raphaelite movement sought intentionally to outrage middle-class tastes and conventions while calling for poetry and paintings divorced from social concerns. The public moralists won by default, however, since the artists became increasingly self-absorbed and self-destructive. The result outlined in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is that the poets and artists of his generation became either totally ineffectual but affected aesthetes such as Brennbaum of the “sky-like limpid eyes” and impeccably dressed or highly paid literary hacks such as Mr. Nixon, who learned how to tailor their work to the taste of editors and reviewers and who caution the young Mauberley to “give up verse, my boy,/ There’s nothing in it.” Part 10, meanwhile, bewails the fate of “the stylist” (thought to be the novelist Ford Madox Ford) who takes refining his art seriously but lives in unrefined squalor and can barely make ends meet. For potential benefactors and the wealthy, represented by the Lady Valentine, poetry has become a “border of ideas” rather than any center to their lives, values, or interests.

The ironic conclusion, “Envoi,” which mimics a seventeenth century poetic style, suggests that Mauberley has learned nothing from his own frustrations or the war’s destructiveness. However, there is that gentle touch in the aestheticism of wishing that his beloved’s graces might live as “roses might, in magic amber laid,/ . . . /Braving time.” This otherwise age-old wish that beauty might yet survive its own undoing by being preserved in and through art is more genuine and vigorous than the claim that only by being unforgiving of personal failures and of those of others can anyone earn the right to consider and comment on the proper place of beauty.

Shortly after the publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound published Mauberley, which is both a commentary on and an extension of the original sequence. As if Pound felt that he had not sufficiently crucified the errant Mauberley in the first work, where his worst offense was that he had been “unaffected by ’The march of events,’” now his art is judged to be “but an art/ In profile” and he has become “incapable of the least utterance or composition.” Another explanation of Pound’s intentions, however, can be found in the short “Medallion” with which Mauberley ends. It is a masterful description of a soprano in concert, a word painting worthy of the High Renaissance, which is alluded to in the reference to Bernardino Luini, a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci. The medallion also calls to mind Henry James’s metaphor for the structure of his novel The Ambassadors (1903), whose tone and style Pound confessed to having attempted to duplicate in verse. Finally, readers are told that the “honey-red” of her hair seems spun of “intractable amber,” reminiscent of the image of rose preserved from the ravages of time by amber in Mauberley’s earlier “Envoi”; thus the third “artist” to share the spotlight with Luini and James in Pound’s closing paean to servers of the Beautiful is none other than his own fictive creation, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. This is not unworthy company, nor does it make Mauberley’s “art in profile” an inferior art, especially since Pound, in drawing his portrait of Mauberley, seems to be practicing the same technique by asking readers to imagine what the poet is gazing at rather than to gaze at the poet.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, through the process of its concealments and confusions, forces readers to focus sharply and clearly on issues that might transcend the aesthetic—issues such as war, public morality, and literary politics—but that are, in Pound’s view, inextricably intertwined with the aesthetic. In severely criticizing one kind of aestheticism, the poem manages only to create another, but that is the poem’s theme—that there is not a separation but a very vital and nurturing link between art and life as well as between the artist and society.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’s critical reputation has seldom wavered. Virtually from the time of its publication, it has been recognized as an important statement by a major poetic voice. The greater critical acclaim for T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), which shows some similarity of technique, serves to overshadow Pound’s achievement somewhat (the irony is that Pound played a crucial editorial role in giving Eliot’s poem its form). While Pound’s Cantos (1917-1969), to which the poet devoted most of the rest of his creative life, has also kept Hugh Selwyn Mauberley from receiving the full critical attention it deserves, there is little denying that the earlier work was the proving ground for both the techniques and the ideas utilized in Cantos.

Bibliography

Espey, John. Ezra Pound’s Mauberley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. In this major full-length study, Espey focuses on the Mauberley persona, Pound’s sources, and the poem’s overall structure. Concludes that Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a summing up of all Pound had achieved up to that point, and it prefigures Cantos.

Hoffmann, Frederick J. The Twenties: American Writing in the Post-War Decade. New York: Macmillan, 1962. A thorough treatment of that rich literary decade, Hoffmann’s study discusses Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in its social, literary, and intellectual context.

Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. A critical overview of Pound’s achievements and his place in and impact on literature and culture. A highly engaging text for the more ambitious student who wishes to understand Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in the context of Pound’s career.

Leavis, F. R. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation. 1932. Reprint. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Leavis’s chapter on Pound set the tone and direction for much subsequent criticism and remains an important source for the discussion of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

Nadel, Ira Bruce. The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Introductory overview containing information about Pound’s life, poetry, prose, and the contexts and critical reception of his works. The references to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley are listed in the index.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Collection of essays, including discussions of Pound and the making of modernism; his influence on American poetry; his depiction of women and gender; and his politics, economics, and anti-Semitism.

Pratt, William. Ezra Pound and the Making of Modernism. New York: AMS Press, 2007. Describes Pound as the “mastermind” of modernism, tracing his involvement and impact in the literary movement. Discusses Pound’s evolution as a poet and his significant influence on twentieth century American poetry.

Witemeyer, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, 1908-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. This thoroughgoing analysis of Pound’s early poetry and poetic theories culminates in an extended treatment of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Argues that the poem is a critique of a failed impressionist aesthetic rendered in the emerging terms of the modernist aesthetic Pound was to perfect in Cantos.