Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

by Pericles Lewis


Ezra Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) describes, in the third person, a middle-aged avant-garde poet living “out of key with his time” in a post-war civilization. Pound called the poem “an attempt to condense the James novel.” Here, at the end of the war, Pound condemned the whole affair in a parody of heroic war poetry: “There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization.” Echoing the same line from Horace that the war poet Wilfred Owen had famously called a “lie,” Pound wrote of those who fought:


Died some, pro patria, non dulce non et decor …
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.


Pound also introduced here one of the major social and economic concerns that would dominate much of his major work, The Cantos: usury, the charging of excessive interest on a loan. The condemnation of usury became a central part of Pound’s theories about the decline of the modern age, which he later blamed largely on Jewish financiers. More broadly, Pound here gave voice to the general sense of the war as a betrayal of the young by the “old men.” He makes an explicit connection between the war and the contemporary fascination with Odysseus, the hero who returns from the Trojan War to find usurpers have tried to take away his land and his wife-- a parallel that will be important in the first of Pound's Cantos,as well as in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and, of course, James Joyce's Ulysses. 


Like Eliot, Pound championed “impersonality” in poetry, but his technique in Mauberly, like Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (and indebted to the Victorian poet Robert Browning), was to invent a persona who bore an uncertain relation to the poet himself. Mauberley, like Prufrock, is an object of irony and pity, but part of the poem’s attraction is the sympathy mixed with the pity we feel for the hapless poet.[1]


  1. ↑This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 121-122.


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