Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Style)

Style

Point of View

The most enduringly difficult aspect of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” is the maddening way that Pound creates two alter egos. These alter egos may be aspects of himself but to what extent? What in them does he admire, what in them does he wish us to condemn, what of himself does he unconsciously include? E. P., one of the alter egos, even has Pound’s own initials — is he an earlier version of Pound, accurately portrayed, or is he (like James Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus) a satirized version of some of the author’s old traits?

E. P. is the first alter ego. We learn this from the fact that the first poem is called “E.P. Ode pour l’election de son sepulchre,” or “E.P. Ode for the Selection of His Tomb.” E. P. is clearly the “he” of this first poem, a young poet who came to Europe from his own “half-savage country” and wanted to “resuscitate” the art of poetry and the old-style “sublime.” The imagery of the poem presents E. P. as an aesthete, contemplating “the elegance of Circe’s hair” while history passes him by. Most of the poems of the E. P. section of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” show snapshots of late Victorian London and its literary scene; E. P. is either absent or his presence barely registers (much as Pound seems to think is the case with aesthetes in general). However, throughout the poem, he observes everything that is going on around himself. But a knowledge of Pound’s own life shows that E. P. and Pound have much in common: acquaintances, artistic tastes, life experiences.

Mauberley is a different matter. He almost literally fades out of the poems as he refines his aesthetic tastes even more. Pound often uses the image of a medallion throughout the five poems of the Mauberley sequence, alluding to Pound’s own fascination with Pisanello, with coinage, and “mould in plaster” that “the age demanded” in the second poem of the E. P. sequence. Like the profile on a medallion or a coin, Mauberley is only seen in half-view; he is never fully there. Mauberley is a different kind of aesthete than E. P. While E. P. will follow the sirens, Mauberley will lose himself in the sensual pleasures of the land of the lotus-eaters. E. P. exists in the world but does nothing of importance in it, while Mauberley, a man of admittedly more refined aesthetic sensibilities, runs the risk of just fading out as he melts into his sensual pleasures.

Allusion

Allusions (implied or indirect reference) to dozens of sources fill “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” Whole books have been written tracking down all of Pound’s allusions, but it is possible to understand the essential message of the poem with the explanation of just a few of them. Most of the allusions fall into two categories: allusions to the classical world and allusions to the aesthetic/decadent worlds.

Most important, probably, are the allusions to classical civilization, for at this point in his career Pound was searching for a way to use classical civilization as a way to understand the modern world. On a basic level, E. P. and Mauberley represent two types of Odysseus’s companions from Homer’s Odyssey: E. P., the sailors lured by the sirens, and Mauberley, the sailors who stay on the island of the lotus-eaters. But these are by no means the only classical allusions. The poem begins with an epigram by the Carthaginian poet Nemesianus, and in the first poem Pound also alludes to the Odyssey three times, the muses, and one of the “Seven against Thebes” from Sophocles’s play. The rest of the poem continues to allude to the Greeks and Romans, referring to “an Attic grace,” “the mousse-line of Cos,” Samothrace, Pisistratus, Horace, and many others, in the first few poems alone. There is no unifying structure to the allusions; Pound saw the classical world as still being alive and relevant, and the poem shows how both E. P. and Mauberley felt the same.

The allusions to the late 1800s and early 1900s in London are much more specific and less accessible to the nonspecialist. “Mr. Nixon,” for instance, alludes to authors Arnold Bennett and Henry James, and “Yeux glaugues” alludes to Victorian politicians Robert Buchanan and Prime Minister William Gladstone and writers John Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Some of the allusions are plain; others, such as Brennbaum, are disguised.

Topics for Further Study

• How did various writers respond to World War I? Compare and contrast the works of two writers of the time. Examples are the poems of Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon and novels such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
• Although he stayed in London for most of World War I and did not take part in it, a much older Ezra Pound lived in Italy throughout World War II and wrote and performed radio broadcasts for Mussolini’s state radio network. For this act, he was indicted for treason in 1943. Research the “case of Ezra Pound” and write an essay about his life during World War II. How did his writings from World War II compare and contrast with his writings from World War I?
• Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” takes place largely in a London that is long gone. It is hard to imagine what daily life was like in that city in 1909, when Pound first moved there. Research the details of daily life in London in 1909 and write an essay about it. How did people move around the city? How was the nation governed? What were the popular pastimes? How did people find out about world events?
• In 1914, Pound edited a collection of poems that he called Des Imagistes, or “some imagists.” He created the imagist movement, wrote its manifestos, and recruited the poets who took part in this literary group. Research the imagists and prepare a speech about them. Who were they? What were the “rules” of the school? What group did Pound found after he grew tired of imagism? Who took over the movement?