Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Research Articles

Katharine Tynan as the Source of Lionel Johnson ‘Barstool’ Myth in Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)

Scholars of both fin-de-siecle and modernist literature will be familiar with the portrait of the ‘1890 s generation’ found in Ezra Pound’s semi-autobiographical poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Among the narratives recounted by ‘Monsieur Verog’ in the poem (a character based on the poet and librarian Victor Plarr), the story of poet and critic Lionel Johnson falling off a barstool to his death is the most well-known and often repeated: For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club; Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died By falling from a high stool in a pub …1 Pound’s portrait anticipates W. B. Yeats’s account of the doomed ‘tragic generation’ in his 1922 autobiography, The Trembling of the Veil. Indeed, several scholars have identified Yeats as a likely source for Pound’s fallacious representation of Johnson, who in fact died due to a series of strokes.2 Russell...

Satirizing Modernism: Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

Satirizing Modernism: Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

Collaborator: Ezra Pound, Translation, and Appropriation

This article discusses a number of Pound's poetic works, including Homage to Sextus Propertius, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and selected cantos, in relation to the practice of collaborative translation undertaken by numerous modernist authors. In Pound's case, such collaboration takes the form, in the main, of a creative partnership with poets central to his conception of the ‘Tradition’, for example, Homer and Propertius. In Pound's hands, the source text is ‘made new’ for a modernist target culture by means of strategies allied to his development of a poetics of appropriation, beginning with his composition of the Malatesta Cantos, in 1922–23. Pound's collaborative engagement with pre-existing texts, or ‘found materials’, is compared in detail to the notion of ‘translation as displacement’ developed in the recent conceptual writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, in particular, his multi-lingual Against Translation. This comparative reading, it is argued, assists in an appraisal of aspects of the politics of The Cantos, specifically the growing anti-capitalism of Pound's epic in the inter-war years.

“Mandate of Eros”: The Disease of Love in Eliot, Pound, and British Psychology

T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley constitute studies in the paradoxically arresting and motivating power of erotic love and its relation to impotent and creative verse. While love paralyzes Eliot’s Prufrock, Pound uses the voice of Mauberley to both illustrate and overcome the paradoxical nature of love in order to give birth to a fertile poetics after his earlier frustrated attempts. Though the voices of Prufrock and Mauberley share similarities, I argue that we ought not conflate Eliot’s and Pound’s poetics. Instead, a clear difference arises between the two when considering the British integral school of psychology that influenced Eliot’s and Pound’s early work during their years in England. Applying the work of one of the members of this school, William Brown, to Eliot’s and Pound’s poetry reveals that “Prufrock” instantiates a poetics of pathological passionate love, whereas Mauberley achieves a poetry of what Brown calls the “divine” affection of love over and against the passionate love prevalent in modernity.

The Gender and Politics of Imagism and Vorticism: Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

Ezra Pound was a legendary modernist who initiates and develops Imagism and Vorticism. By discussing several critics’ arguments on Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” I examine early Pound’s poetics and poetry in terms of gender and politics. Through exploring Pound’s Imagism and Vorticism, I find that Pound’s conversion to fascism is closely related to his own poetics. Also in “In a Station of the Metro,” the image of “the crowd” is quite important in that “the crowd” seems to be ambivalent. The “crowd” represents, for Pound, the age of the masses. The crowd and the machine demand “a mould in plaster,” the mass production, making with “no loss of time.” The female sexuality strongly influences early Pound and, then, he starts his drift toward politics rooted in aestheticism. Finally, the gender structure determines Pound’s poetics and politics, and his phallic power comes to have a feminine reinforcement.

POETRY IN REVIEW

1 6 1 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R Is literary history possible? It is still not clear to me, to respond belatedly to David Perkins’s trenchant question of twenty-some years ago, the degree to which one can really write sound literary history. American poetry, to narrow the field, especially if one has in view the major practitioners, is more like a four-dimensional network than a sequence of periods or a chain of phases linked by causality. That proposition is of course a corollary to one paradoxical principle behind T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’: ‘‘The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’’ My former colleague Robert M. Adams taught a seminar that he called ‘‘Hard, Beautiful Poems.’’ The texts ranged over the centuries. One implication was that the criteria of hardness (which I take to mean intellectual di≈culty rather than but certainly not exclusive of density, which is often a component of the former) and beauty (easier and more troublesome to gloss, it shades o√ into sublimity by way of splendor and radiance) transcended the hisB a r e l y C o m p o s e d , b y A l i c e F u l t o n ( N o r t o n , 9 4 p p . , $ 2 9 . 9 5 ) 1 6 2 Y E N S E R Y torical dimension. I don’t have any of his syllabi, alas – but hooray, since I am free to imagine that the students’ readings included, in an order their professor liked, some of the following: Shakespeare’s Sonnets 94, 107, and 112, Donne’s ‘‘Air and Angels’’ and ‘‘The Extasie,’’ Pope’s ‘‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,’’ Keats’s ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’ (familiarity does not obviate difficulty), and Browning ’s ‘‘A Grammarian’s Funeral,’’ ‘‘Fra Lippo Lippi,’’ and ‘‘Caliban upon Setebos.’’ Though ‘‘difficulty’’ in this context is not a contingent quality but an absolute one, which graces the temporal work now and then, it must also be said that since the beginning of the past century it has been especially prized in some aesthetic quarters. Eliot writes (in his ‘‘Conclusion’’ to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism) of its exigency for the modern poem, and when Wallace Stevens insists (in his Adagia) that a good poem ‘‘must resist the intelligence almost successfully,’’ the adverb comes across as something of a hedge. Indeed, one might argue that ‘‘Hard, Beautiful Poems’’ is a seminar title itself symptomatic of an era – the modern, say. More recent poets who might be assigned in the seminar would surely include those who invented their own ‘‘language within’’ a ‘‘common’’ language, to appropriate James Merrill’s definition from his sonnet ‘‘The Parnassians,’’ a celebration cum critique of aestheticism. In addition to Mallarmé they might include Emily Dickinson (selected poems, mind you), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein (in Tender Buttons), Ezra Pound (‘‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’’), John Berryman (especially in the ‘‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet’’), and Geoffrey Hill. A glance at that list of names will tell the reader that for this reviewer the pertinent difficulty is inextricable from linguistic extravagance and idiosyncrasy. ‘‘Hard’’ is a hard word, and no one would dispute the notion that Robert Frost can be as adamant as corundum (not to mentionasabrasive),ascan,intheirdifferentways,poetsasvarious as Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Donald Justice, Fredrick Seidel, and Louise Glück. The difficulty I have in mind, however, relates to excess, eccentricity, and obscurity, and it is separable from the ‘‘beautiful.’’ Elizabeth Bishop, surely one of thehandfuloflate-twentieth-centurypoetswhowillbereadonthe lunar frontier, extravagant though she is in a narrow sense of the term, is not ‘‘hard’’ the way that Dickinson can be. P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 6 3 R Among the work of contemporary American poets, none, it seems to me, comports better with our two criteria than that of Alice Fulton, most...

Pound e l'economia: gli inizi

Pound’s economics is largely based on his poetic notion of “usura” surfacing for the first time in the war sections of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and based on C. H. Douglas’s unorthodox underconsumptionist theory of Social Credit . Since Pound is not an economist but a poet, in order to understand the way in which economics permeates his poetry and essays one should bear in mind that Pound’s utopian crusade against financiers is closely tied to his avant-garde efforts to create a new poetic language. In this essay I will briefly survey four stages decisively shaping his early economic ‘education’: first, his London experiences in the radical magazine The New Age with its strong Ruskinian allegiances; secondly, his own American agrarian background which consciously or unconsciously and in various hues, stayed with him his whole life; thirdly, his editing Eliot’s The Waste Land along with the idea of art as handicraft; finally I will examine one of the Hell Cantos where the financiers’ corrupting economics merges with the corruption of language.

The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound by Frances Dickey (review)

Reviewed by: The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound by Frances Dickey John D. Morgenstern The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound. Frances Dickey. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. x + 260. $45.00 (cloth). Literary history is often told in terms of breaking points and watershed manifestos, and accounts of early twentieth-century literature are particularly susceptible to narratives of rupture and rejection. Virginia Woolf’s famous assertion that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed” underwrote the dominant perception that she and her contemporaries developed an avant-garde sensibility overnight, following their initial encounter with Matisse’s radical experimentation in color, Picasso’s fracturing of pictorial space into cubes, and the prismatic energy of Marinetti’s Futurist aesthetic. Once in contact with these developments in the visual [End Page 573] arts, so the story goes, modernist writers dispensed with nineteenth-century literary conventions to experiment with wholly new modes of representation. Frances Dickey’s The Modern Portrait Poem challenges this reductive history by bringing nineteenth-century painting to bear on early twentieth-century poetry, rightly balancing continuity with rupture to present a refreshingly nuanced portrait of the relationship between the visual and literary arts at the advent of modernism. At the very moment that the Manifesto of Futurist Painters urged a new generation of European poets to “finish off” the portraitists and other genre painters, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings all started their careers as portrait poets on the opposite side of the Atlantic. In 1908, Eliot was inspired by a reproduction of French Impressionist Édouard Manet’s portrait Young Lady in 1866 to write “On a Portrait,” the precursor to his better-known “Portrait of a Lady.” Taking stock of his early poetic output on the last page of Umbra in 1920, Pound divided his work categorically into “Personae and Portraits,” identifying “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and a sequence encompassing “Langue d’Oc” and “Mœurs Contemporaines” as portrait poems. Williams penned a series titled “Pastorals and Self-Portraits” in 1914, succeeded by portraits of women including his own “Portrait of a Lady.” Cummings’s 1922 manuscript for Tulips and Chimneys included twenty-nine poems copied under the heading “PORTRAITS.” Far from “finishing off” the popular Victorian genre, these poets and a myriad others inherited and transformed the nineteenth-century portrait poem, at once identifying their work with a set of recognizable precedents and refashioning portraiture as a contemporary form. In fact, efforts to modernize the portrait poem began in earnest a half century before Eliot and his contemporaries had turned to the genre, by the poets and painters of the Aesthetic movement that surrounded Dante Gabriel Rossetti. These artists contested and revised the modus operandi of Victorian portraitists, who aspired to reveal the interiority of their subjects through the use of clichéd equivalences in which posture corresponded to personality and minor aspects of demeanor revealed the state of the sitter’s soul. In the 1860s, Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, Algernon Swinburne and Edward Burne-Jones in Britain, along with Manet across the Channel, produced a series of portrait paintings and poems that emphasized surface over depth, subverting Victorian emphasis on Cartesian conceptions of selfhood. Rossetti blurred the facile dichotomy of interior and exterior and introduced a radically divergent phenomenology in his sonnet “Heart’s Hope,” where he refuses the physical/spiritual distinction and signifies a collective consciousness in a direct address to his subject: “Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor / Thee from myself.” Dickey’s analysis follows the modern portrait poem as it evolved along two distinct, yet complementary, trajectories laid out in Rossetti’s sonnet, one of which gives the same prominence to the material self once accorded to the soul, and the second of which explores interiority as shared between groups, figures, or objects. Both modes unite in their examination of the central questions of what it means to be human and how individuals conceive of themselves in relation to others. The materialist thread linking modernist portraiture to aestheticism is represented in this volume by a real diversity of poets...

A study of Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

This paper attempts to examine Mauberley, as it forms an important document of transatlantic modernist poetry and is a scathing satire on the prevalent literary scene in England. We seem to revel in announcing periodically the death of something/someone or the other. Many years ago Barthes declared that the author was dead although writers continued to collect their royalties duly. And now we are speaking of the Death of the Theory itself. In brief, this article attempts to analyze the death of art in Ezra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

Writing, Remembering and Embodiment: Australian Literary Responses to the First World War

This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community.

The Homeric Elpenor and those who made il gran rifiuto (Dante's Inferno, Canto 3) in the poetry of George Seferis: Modernist nekuias and antiheroism

The First World War has been linked with the appearance of iconic modernist epics, where the theme of the nether world has pride of place, most often based on the archetypal journeys to the Underworld in Homer’s Odyssey (book 11), Virgil’s Aeneid (book 6) or Dante’s Inferno. It was in the context of these modernist reworkings of the Underworld that Elpenor, the first shade encountered by Odysseus in his journey to the Underworld, established his presence in modern literature. But in no other writer did Elpenor play such a pivotal role as he would play in the work of the Greek poet George Seferis (Nobel laureate 1963). This article explores how the Seferian Elpenor was formed through a slow process where the poet’s wish to write ‘an Odyssey in reverse’ was initially informed by a negative reaction towards C. P. Cavafy’s ‘Dantian’ poem ‘Che fece … il gran rifiuto’, and then by a poetic dialogue with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Canto 1 and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. It sheds new light on the complex intertextual nexus around Elpenor as a modern antihero and offers new perspectives on Seferis’ early involvement with Cavafy and Pound.

The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega David Cowart (bio) Many have anatomized the disquiet experienced by Americans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but few have done so with as much subtlety and intellectual brio as Don DeLillo. In nuanced, stylistically distinctive, often funny meditations on all that has happened to us and all that we dread, DeLillo captures something that everyone feels and no one fully understands. Frank Lentricchia perceptively characterizes DeLillo’s novels as “montages of tones, styles, and voices that have the effect of yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America” (2). Lentricchia’s terms—“montages,” “yoking”—signal the qualities in DeLillo’s writing that link it to other modern and contemporary art: cinema, collage, even verse influenced by the metaphysical poets (given to “heterogeneous ideas . . . yoked by violence together,” as Samuel Johnson famously observed [15]). Derived at least in part from the modernist aesthetic that married a high standard of economy to new representational challenges, DeLillo’s prose strikes readers as elliptical yet replete, brimming with intimation. Supercharging predication in sentence after sentence, he performs something of a stylistic highwire act: if the reader ever suspects the least element of rhetorical fakery, down comes the house of pregnant prose. Such whiffs from the sewer of pretension in fact undermine the gnomic pronouncements of Richard Elster, the central figure in DeLillo’s 2010 novel Point Omega.As Ezra Pound, or T. S. Eliot, or James Joyce creates a flawed version [End Page 31] of himself as Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, or J. Alfred Prufrock, or Stephen Dedalus, so does DeLillo, in Elster, imagine his own secret sharer. Properly to read and analyze any DeLillo work, one needs to avoid the premature pronouncement, the facile assessment that belies this author’s true originality as thinker and maker. I would like to offer a reading of Point Omega attentive to the rich suggestiveness of the DeLillo style. To that end, I beg the reader’s patience if my remarks about meaning in this novel give way only gradually to actual assertions. That is, I propose to approach my subject—at least initially—in what Jacques Derrida, commenting on Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, characterizes as a “speculative” or “athetic” mode, the better to remain open to meanings that a more thesis-driven analysis might throttle in the hermeneutic crib.1 I do not mean to be mysterious. My argument will emerge in two parts, the first focused on cinematic ekphrasis in this novel, the second on the perennially vexed question of just how an artist can, without didacticism, incorporate political perceptions into work that they might render tendentious. Ultimately, I will argue for a kind of astute ascesis in DeLillo’s engagement with political themes. Though he foregrounds the spiritual crisis of an apologist for the Second Gulf War, DeLillo deflects problems of immediate political legitimacy toward larger, less topical questions of a civilization’s decline. He perpends the prospect of an omega point for the American empire. 1 One thinks of the DeLillo oeuvre as a rich weave of thematic or semic elements that include language, terror, film, deserts, American identities, and, with increasing urgency, eccentric and unusual artworks. As early as Americana, readers encounter considerable emphasis on the extraliterary artistic enterprise—whether [End Page 32] the film that David Bell is making or the strange sculptures of his friend Sullivan. But toward the latter part of his career, DeLillo begins to carry ekphrasis and allusion to new heights—thus Andy Warhol (and Warhol pastiche) figures in Mao II, Pieter Bruegel at the Polo Grounds and B–52s in the desert in Underworld, and the performance art of Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist. The story “Baader-Meinhof” centers on a suite of Gerhard Richter paintings, Falling Man on the guerrilla theater of David Janiak. Characters in Cosmopolis participate in a Spencer Tunick–like project, and Alex Macklin, the moribund artist in Love-Lies-Bleeding, embraces “land art” (25) and imagines painting “every square inch” of “[a] chamber, a cubical room. Fashioned out of solid rock” (59). One can often—perhaps always— discern in such material...

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

Liliana Ursu A Path to the Sea Pleasure Boat Studio With poems that span the world, this newest collection of poetry by Romanian poet Ursu is electrifying. When discussing the work she performed in this collection, translator Tess Gallagher remarks that the poems are like lightning, leaving readers “singed and stricken but lifted by their illuminations.” Ursu’s acclaim has spread across the world, and she is recognized in her Romanian homeland as a Knight of Arts and Literature, the nation’s highest cultural honor. Jean-Philippe Toussaint The Truth About Marie Dalkey Archive Returning to the narrator from his previous novel, Running Away, this newest publication from acclaimed French author Toussaint (considered a “Camus for the twenty-first century”) follows the narrator’s relationship with Marie. Typical of Toussaint ’s literary style, the novel relies more on the intrinsic pace of action rather than the plot itself. This novel is Toussaint’s most acclaimed work to date. Nota Bene very nearly does. He also excoriates “the moist, vapid effusion that greeted the death of Diana Spencer” and the unearned appropriation of grief at the killings at Virginia Tech as “proof of how utterly painless all this vicarious ‘pain’ really is.” And his view of the British royal family can be summed up in “This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII.” But he is equally sharp on the failings of JFK. Although Hitchens can be snarky, he makes interesting and often valid points, mostly negative, about the weakness of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and his analysis of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is both pointed and balanced. Even when he condemns, as in his discussion of Waugh, he can see virtues to mitigate faults. On the (very great) whole, the chief impression one might take from this massive collection is that, given the willingness of outlets like Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, and Slate to publish extended and thoughtful material like this, the condition of American journalism and thought might not be quite as bad as some have feared. Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma Manning Marable. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York. Viking. 2011. isbn 9780670022205 Reading the life, and death, of Malcolm Little is reading forty pivotal years of the history and culture of tumultuous mid-twentieth-century America. Perhaps more than in any other American book, Alex Haley’s 1965 transcription of that life allowed one to empathize with those whose lives were warped by racial prejudice in America and to see the tangible, dynamic, multifaceted reality of black culture in a way that few other texts have succeeded in doing. Fearing disappointment , I hesitatingly opened Manning Marable’s new biography. Marable’s biography is scrupulously researched. He excavates, through extensive archival research, details that amplify our understanding of the sociohistorical context. Manning also consulted the FBI reports on Malcolm, and notes the massive number of converts, frequently former soldiers and convicts, to the Nation of Islam in the postwar 1950s, and calls our attention to the arrival on the East Coast of a Caribbean calypso artist named Louis Walcott who joins, and remains with, the Nation of Islam even after its decision to ban performers from membership. That same Louis, renamed Farrakhan, replaced Malcolm as national minister after the latter had been ostracized by Elijah Muhammad. Moreover, Marable astutely tracks the gradually widening rift between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm after the latter, influenced by both the Civil Rights movement and his Hajj to Mecca, distanced himself from black separatism. Marable relates what was seen as Malcolm’s joy at President Kennedy’s death with his “Chickens come home to roost” remark after Elijah Muhammad had ordered him not to comment on the president specifically in his criticisms of the American government. The biography traces Malcolm’s moving closer to the color-blind perspective of orthodox Islam after his travels to Saudi Arabia and Ghana as well as his inevitable questioning of the separatist dogma of Elijah Muhammad. It January–February 2012 | 77 was upon his return from his Hajj that Malcolm broke from the Nation of Islam and founded...

Modernism's Medieval Imperative: The Hard Lessons of Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Ezra Pound, modernism’s greatest impresario, was also a frustrated medievalist. Accepted into the University of Pennsylvania at the age of fifteen on the strength of his facility in Latin, he transferred to Hamilton College after poor grades in his sophomore year. There he cultivated an interest in Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages, especially Provencal. He also developed a serious interest in Dante: by the age of twenty he had already decided to write a modern epic modeled on the Commedia. After graduating from Hamilton, he returned to Penn to do graduate work in medieval Romance topics. Although he dropped out without starting his doctorate, when he arrived in London in 1909 he got a job lecturing on medieval literature at the Regent Street Polytechnic. These lectures became the basis for his first critical book, The Spirit of Romance, published in 1910. His early poetry abounds in medieval themes, parodies, translations, and recreations. In 1920, even after he had firmly established himself internationally as a leading modernist poet and thinker, he still sought the long-delayed doctorate. Unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania refused his request to receive the degree based on his published work. After 1920, Pound devoted himself to The Cantos, the long-projected

J. A. BURROW, The Poetry of Praise.

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.

Ezra Pound's Esteem for Edmund Waller: A New Source for Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Ezra Pound's Esteem for Edmund Waller: A New Source for Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

James Merrill's Polyphonic Muse

James Merrill's Polyphonic Muse Timothy Materer University of Missouri-Columbia Early in his career, James Merrill considered the influence of the modernist poets "something to react against" (Collected Prose 51). Merrill thought that T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams revealed a "drift toward the more or less monumental" that obscured the human scale of their work. In Merrill's view, they began their careers writing "small, controllable" poems, but then each produced—in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and Paterson—a "huge, unruly text that grapples ravenously with everything under the sun" (351). When he read Elizabeth Bishop, the intimate tone of her poetry seemed the "antidote to those ambitious and daunting 'giants' of modernism" (155, 163). When finishing his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), however, Merrill realized that his poetic development had come to resemble that of the modernists. He admitted in 1980 that, following the modernist tendency toward the monumental, he "felt a similar pressure at work in my own case" (351). The pressure that led Merrill to write the "huge, unruly text" of The Changing Light at Sandover included the desire to grapple with a variety of subjects. But more significant, as we will see in Merrill's own description of his development, was his desire to get beyond the limited sense of self and the constrained voice of his early [End Page 207] poetry. Like Eliot's Prufrock or Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, whom Pound described as "consciousness disjunct" (201), Merrill's poetic personae were limited by their alienated self-consciousness. Merrill's A Different Person (1993), a memoir that centers on the years 1950–52, describes his early career in the familiar terms of a young poet finding his own voice. 1 Dissatisfied with the voice of his early poems, he experimented by dramatizing aspects of the self as separate voices before he conceived of the poem as a medium for voices independent of the conscious self. In his one-act poetic play The Bait (1953) and long lyric poems such as "The Thousand and Second Night" and "From the Cupola" (Nights and Days, 1966), he experimented with a variety of speakers. In The Changing Light, he created a long poem that can be characterized in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms as a "polyphonic" work of layered voices. Merrill's ambition to speak in his own voice developed into the need to express the multiple selves or voices within him. Merrill's conception of himself as an "author" became more complex as he explored his poetic and sexual nature. A Different Person allows us to see why Merrill remarked on "how little choice I had in the matter" of his poetic development because of the complex psychological factors that went into it (Collected Prose 351). A Different Person links his growth as a poet to his growing understanding of his sexual nature. Finding his voice, his poetic muse, and a sense of his inner femininity were all linked. Merrill recalls making progress on The Bait only after he had made its narrator a woman, because "words came more easily to me in a woman's voice than in a man's" (Different Person 251). This statement seems surprising because, especially in the fifties, Merrill's poetry did not appear to speak in a feminine voice or create a feminine persona. Even though Merrill's love poems were written to other men, a reader of that time would be likely to assume that they were written by a man to a woman. As Merrill wrote in A Different Person, the [End Page 208] obscurity of his early poems had the effect of "masking . . . the gender of my loves" (183). Such masking and obscurity in his early poetry were limitations Merrill wanted to escape by finding a more authentic self and poetic voice. By leaving New York for Europe and eventually settling in Rome, he hoped to remake his poetry by remaking himself and becoming...

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

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.”...

'Arid clarity': Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, and Jules Laforgue

Ezra Pound's interest in the work of Mina Loy is well-known, but while some critics have noted the impact of his work upon hers, little attention has so far been given to the possibility of reciprocal influence. My essay proposes that Pound's reading of Loy's early poems may have shaped the style of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and also that her later poem, 'Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose' might in turn have entered into a kind of critical 'dialogue' with "Mauberley". The essay examines the Laforguian terms in which Pound constructed his reading of Loy, and proceeds to distinguish her particular brand of 'verbalism' from Poundian 'logopoeia'.

Forms of Irony: Modern and Post-Modern

In this paper I would like to examine a rather special kind of irony that could be justly called 'comparative irony'. What I have in mind is the case when an author, in order to show the worthlessness of his own age, juxtaposes some well-known cultural values of the past with their obviously less valuable present-time equivalents. My examples, the two works that I would like to compare from this point of view, were created almost at the same time, in the same cultural milieu, by very close acquaintances, and with very different results. I will compare T. S. Eliot's masterpiece, The Waste Land with Ezra Pound's less known Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and especially their different intertextual uses of the same locus from the Divina Commedia.