J. A. BURROW, The Poetry of Praise.

Abstract

JOHN BURROW begins his learned, sage, and delightfully readable book by remarking that, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Ezra Pound laments the absence of heroes worthy of laurels in the modern age. Why should poetry have ceased to exercise what, in the larger history of poetry, has been one of its principal functions (i.e. the distribution of praise)? One reason may be that some of those who claimed and received the praise reserved for heroes in the twentieth-century were fascist leaders, of precisely the kind that Pound himself came to admire some time after the composition of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1921. Contemporary institutions of high literary culture, as distinct from cinema, for example, distrust unalloyed praise, with good reason. To be sure, the causes of this distrust are far deeper than the deep distrust of fascism's claim to heroic status; in the English tradition, by Burrow's account, serious praise poetry has been in steep decline from the middle of the seventeenth century.