Intertextual “tissue preserved”: a Reading of Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Abstract

Recorded archives of poets reading their own works sometimes yield provocative insights into the texts they chose or were asked to recite. In the case of T.S. Eliot’s performance of The Waste Land the jarring contrast between the work’s built-in polyphony and the neutral soundscape created by Eliot’s leveling of intonational differences is symptomatic of the poem’s simultaneous “dismissal of connections between images, scenes and voices” and blurring of the “proper boundaries between things.”...