It has been asserted that Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is the seminal work which sees the poet through his greatest transformation. ¹ It was written and published in 1920 at a time when Pound was revising his views about the role of poetry and art. Though it shows ambiguity about the role of the speakers in the poem, it is generally accepted that E.P. and H. S. Mauberley are the two personae through which Pound speaks. These characters both reject the vision of the pre-war aesthete for a temperament that results in the transformation of Mr. Pound.

Ezra Pound recognizes that art is shaped through a societal pressure defined by the demands of the day. He smartly dubs this pressure "the age" as if to hint at the fickle and temporary nature of artistic tastes. The age seems to be demanding "an image of its accelerated grimace". For Pound, that roughly translates to the kind of culture that gives rise to Futurism: a blinded lauding of machines, noises, explosions in harmony with the buzzing of sprawling urban centers and the battery of howitzer guns. To say that Pound's work is a reaction to the art of the age would be a vast understatement. Pound's work does not seek to fit the mold the age demands, it wants to break free and "bear true witness." ² Mauberley thus exposes the inadequacies of British society and artistic tastes and shows the futility of his earlier attempts at "resuscitating the dead art of poetry."

The poem's central focus is towards disillusionment and disgust. It is highly critical of the art demanded. Pound recognizes that his earlier self, dubbed E.P, "strove to resuscitate the dead art of poetry" for three years (1917-1920) through a romantic avenue, a quest to "maintain the sublime"(ln 3). This attempt breaks down after a realization that nothing after the Great War would ever be the same in art; that art's purpose had changed.

¹ Donald E. Stanford, Ezra Pound, 18851972, in his Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry, University of Delaware Press, 1983, pp. 1338. Reproduced by permission

² "Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise." -Ezra Pound

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Thus, after a revision of his aesthetic values, Pound decides to write Mauberley as his farewell to London which echoes a break with his former self. Pound, who was unaffected by the "march of events" in British literature goes on and denounces vices and unflattering deficiencies of British cultural values, namely of Modernism's inadequate reaction to Victorianism. According to Noel Stock, Mauberley is successful in drawing together much of "Europe," telling of "old lies and new infamy and usury age old and age-thick." It denounces the vain and replicable art of the early 20th century. 3

Chiefly a mould in plaster,

Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the 'sculpture' of rhyme.

Otherwise, E.P. saw himself as Odysseus, ears full of wax, resisting the outside world's urges and demands. He stayed due to his course amidst the wailing of sirens and other distractions that were demanded by the age. "His true Penelope was Flaubert," his goal was to achieve what Pound regarded as artistic perfection. Flaubert was somewhat foreign to the British literary culture, as asserted by Hugh Kenner ⁴ in his analysis of Pound's work. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert tried to write a novel about "nothing," in essence to create a perfectly aesthetic piece. E.P., obsessed with this notion sought for several years to re-create this impeccable aesthetic virtue. His disillusionment comes as he realizes that the age demanded "something for the modern stage." Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries Of the inward gaze Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase

³ Noel Stock, "The Life of Ezra Pound." Pantheon Books, Random House, New York, 1970

⁴ Sutton, Walter, ed. "Ezra Pound, a collection of critical essays". Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall 1963

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