POETS Day! Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

Pound was trapped, enamored by the static image, caught between the craft of Apollo and verve of Dionysus.

Photo by me.

The work week’s nearly finito; barely a few hours left. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Ezra Pound was a very good poet but not a master versifier. I think he knew that. “Major Poet” is a term reserved for the greats who define their time and turn swaths of contemporaries into satellites. Yeats is a Major Poet, as is Eliot. “Minor Poet” sounds dismissive, though it’s not. Don’t mistake Minor for bad or run of the mill. Bad or run of the mill poets are called poets. A Minor Poet merits consideration enough have status conferred, to have demonstrated excellence if not tremendous influence.

In his essay “What Is Minor Poetry?,” Eliot picks out Robert Herrick, noting that he shows no “continuous conscientious purpose.” Herrick “is more the purely natural and un-self-conscious man, writing his poems as the fancy seizes him,” and it being Eliot writing, assumes we see and will make our own “gathering his rosebuds as he may” crack. Auden was more pragmatic, declaring that Major Poets have college courses devoted to their work and their work alone while Minor Poets do not. Auden would have made the rosebud joke.

Pound is considered a Major Poet, though as a testament to the fullness of critical criteria. Line for line or poem for poem, he doesn’t compare to his friends Yeats or Eliot. He’s not as fluid in his verse, but he’s dense. His lines are saturated with references and allusion. He’s distinguished by influence, as a man who set a course and guided the development of the art. As an editor, promoter, and anthologist, he did more to shape Modern Poetry than, probably, anyone else of his era. He was blessed with an ear, an eye, and confidence. He looked at The Waste Land, Ulysses, poems by Frost, by HD, Cummings, William Carlos Williams, gave his thoughts on what did and didn’t work, and relied on the genius of the editee to fix the issue. He treated his own work the same, but fixing was a struggle. He spotted flaws he didn’t know how to correct. It must have been maddening.

Frustration set him globetrotting. Pound was born in a small town called Hailey in the Idaho Territory. His family were frontier types with postal appointments, General Land Office, and front-line civic minded organizational interests expected in pioneering hagiographies. His mother wanted to enjoy the results rather than the credit for civilizing and took Ezra East. His father found a job in Philadelphia and there they settled.

He was not without literary stimulation at home. He met William Carlos Williams at U Penn. The two became friends and mutually respected professional contemporaries. I’m not sure under what circumstances he met Hilda Doolittle. She was a classics minded student at Bryn Mawr and he was just returned to Philadelphia from a post graduate program in New York. In any case, he fell for her. For the next few years he pursued an MA in Romance languages, sailed on grants to Spain and France to study jesters and troubadours, and, all the while, publishing here and there, trying on styles, attempting poetic revivals, and pressing himself. America fueled his friend Williams. He saw opportunity to define a national poetics independent of Europe. Pound didn’t want that. The thrill was transforming and advancing the old by making from it something new. He saw America as vulgar, not pretty enough to dance with.

As he writes in the first poem below, he tried America and gave it up at thirty-one though that would men 1916. By that time he’d been living in London for two years, having bounced from Gibraltar to Venice and points between. I assume at the age of thirty-one there was a decision or shift in his thinking that represented a split. He was an American spending time in Europe one day and the next he was an ex-pat. In 1920, he’d decide London constrained him. Paris would later do the same. He may or may not have tired of Rapallo. The US government arrested him for treason after WWII and constrained him less subtly than predominant regional artistic attitudes had, so Rapallo didn’t get a chance for him to tire of it. Prison, St. Elizabeth’s mental ward, and eventual pardon led back to Rapallo and harmlessness, but he was an old man by then, less prone to wandering or running.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Contacts and Life) is Pound’s farewell to England. That’s the new title. Originally it was Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts) but in the 1950 he wrote to his publisher: “Note inversion in subtitle of Mauberley, NOT Life and Contacts but the actual order of the subject matter.” Contacts inform the life, I suppose. “Mauberley” is presented as one poem, though it’s divided into eighteen shorter poems. A great deal has been made of who is speaking when. Mauberley is a failed poet. According to whom you listen, Mauberley is Pound; Mauberley is an aspect of Pound; Mauberley is an independent character resembling Pound only because he served as vehicle for Pound’s concerns. And on and on. Maybe he was Elizabeth I or Francis Bacon. It’s made more confusing by shifts in perspective from one poem or group of poems to the next.

I’m codifying and invoking what I’ll call going forward “Graves’s Maxim,” paraphrased from Robert Graves’s “The Why of the Weather” as “Since no one knows the why of the weather, every poor fool is licensed to try to explain it.” So, my two cents: Mauberley is an aspect of Pound, one which he’s shedding. At times he writes in reflection with regret, at times as an invigorated poet hoping, and at times as an observer. There’s nothing repellent to Pound in the observer or revitalized innovator. It’s the concrete he’s got problems with. The past, the one that happened, didn’t live up. So he distances himself. He gives the past a name and leaves him behind.

The poem was published in 1920, announcing the second of his geographical fixes. Having left the States, he’d done what he could do in England. The Continent, where his troubadours played, held promise.

The cycle begins with a primer from the observer recounting Pound leaving tawdry American origins as prelude to his tawdry English present.

E.P. Ode Pour L’Election de son Seplulchre
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start–

No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;

Idmen gar toi panth, hos eni troie
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

Unaffected by “the march of events,”
He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentuniesme
de son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.

The following poems decry modern London. It’s a crass, commercial time. Men no longer venerate the classical.

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

There’s further commentary on the Pre-Raphealites, popular writers, and drivers of taste.

It’s tempting to mock Pound’s “It’s not me! It’s you!” outbursts at the world for not appreciating his genius, so I do. He’s too precious by half in almost every venture, but he’s daring—damned admirably daring—and possessed of faith that he’s doing something worth doing. I don’t know if his frequent successes fuel his conviction that his failures are not his own, “but for a better audience.” What is clear from his career is that personal fame was not his prime motivation. Certainly he had an outsized ego, but so much of his energy burned promoting what he loved and admired more than for himself. He’s the editor behind The Waste Land, the letter writer insisting Harriet Monroe print Ford, Aldington, and Frost, the fixer bundling clothes for the Joyce children and begging donations for that family so the father can keep writing. He knows what has merit, far better than us. Why don’t we see that? Why do we vex him?

“Envoi (1919)” reveals the poet Mauberley (or not depending on the critic.) The poem is heavy handed in evoking an English lyrical tradition going back to the Elizabethans. It’s peppered with “hadst” and “thou” and critically, references Edmund Waller’s (1606-1687) poem “Song: Go Lovely Rose,” singling that work out from his body by referencing Henry Lawes (1596-1662), who put the poem to song (It sound like an evening with an elderly aunt if you’re curious).

In the poem, Waller argues a shy girl should come out and be seen, that beauty passes, time takes its toll, and her youth is not to be wasted in hiding.

from Song: Go Lovely Rose

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

It’s a “seize the day” seduction piece in the vein of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” but once removed. The speaker is giving advice to a younger man in pursuit of the shy girl. After the above, Waller gets pointed.

Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

I’m assuming the suitor didn’t use that part. In short, engage the world and share your beauty or it was never beauty at all. You live only once.

Pound divided poets. On one hand, there were those in whom he noted an “Epicurean receptivity, a certain aloofness, an observation of contacts and auditions.” In others he saw engagement, “kinship to the vital universe.” (Those quotes highlighted by Vincent Miller in his excellent “Mauberley and His Critics.”) Pound prized the latter, but he knew himself. There was too much of the former in him. He was the Imagist. More than most Pound valued “the thing,” a frozen moment. He was trapped, enamored by the static image, caught between the craft of Apollo and verve of Dionysus.

“Envoi (1919)” is in ironic contrast with Waller. Where he calls to bid her come out and live while she can, Pound/Mauberley asks to immortalize her “in magic amber laid.” He’s to make a museum piece of her, trade her vitality for permanence. Done strait faced it’s an assessment of Pound’s faults thus far, of the Mauberley failings he wants to leave behind.

The italics are Pounds and I can’t begin to tell the conflicting opinions as to why he did so. It certainly signals something and the poem is a turning point, though it would be without slant. Some say it announces a speaker distinct from the rest of the poem while others tell me it’s definitely Pound, Mauberley, or written as some outside exemplar or cautionary tale. Feel free to exercise license and explain it.

Envoi (1919)

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

The poem immediately after is titled “Mauberley” and carries the subtitle “1920” to signal a break from what culminated in the preceeding, marked 1919. It begins with the epigraph, “Vacuos exercet in aera morsus,” a line from the Aeneid that translates to “He deals empty bites into the air,” describing dogs chasing elusive deer. Versions of that futility recur in later poems. The Mauberley character gives up, or is in the process of giving up, his ambitions. Pound compares his course as trading attempts at Renaissance etchings to drudge in “Messalina”: flat copies suited for coins—“medallions” becomes the term.

As the cycle goes on, there’s failed love, “social inconsequence,” and escape to Pacific isolation where the poet dies.

Throughout there are references to The Odyssey. There’s the recurring assertion that Flaubert is the speaker’s Penelope, that the literary home and ultimate artistic destination is Europe. In one of the poems decrying the state of England, “Siena Mi Fe’; Disfecemi Maremma,” Pound enlists the poet Lionel Johnson, who died after a fall in a pub, to recall Elpenor, who fell from Circe’s roof and died unnoticed, assumed to have stayed on Circe’s island but later encountered in Hades where he implored Odysseus to go back and give him burial rights. The hero and crew did so and marked Elpenor’s grave with an oar.

And so did Pound to Mauberley, the aspect that continued to haunt his work despite his attempts to exorcize it. Ending the penultimate poem:

Coracle of Pacific voyages,
The unforcasted beach;
Then on an oar
Read this:

“I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist.”

The final poem has been interpreted as a last failure of the Mauberley persona. Others have it as Pound assessing his career to date. I think it’s Pound doubling down on intentions. It’s defiance. I’m not alone in this. Titled “Medallion” after the lifeless works of Mauberley, he points to Luini whose body of work is considered passable but for the standout “Head of a Girl.” There’s a reference to rising Venus as represented in Reinach’s art history book, Apollo. Exquisite detail, metallic, masterwork.

In his later works Pound ties Aphrodite to topaz. I can’t find a referent. The connection seems to be an invention for his own mythology but it’s one he put to use in the The Cantos and, I’m told, Homage to Sexstus Propertius. Below is its first appearance.

Medallion

Luini in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.

The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.

Honey-red, closing the face-oval,
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber;

The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its sauve bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.

The cold, hard, precise image warms and the eyes show life. It was that there are “eyes” and not “eye” that first clued me towards this poem as Pound gathering power than Mauberley tilting at windmills. Medallions—cameos in my mind—are flat profiles. Earlier Pound writes of Mauberley trying to “convey the relation / Of eye-lid and cheek-bone.” Not “eye-lids” or “cheekbones.” I presumed the subjects were in profile so the mention of eyes in the final stanza of the whole is dramatic. I may be wrong about this. Pound may have envisioned full frontal or three quarter medallions.

If that’s the case and I am wrong, the last line is still a wonder. The eyes are infused with desire, alive. If I’m right, the last verb “turn” carries meaning in addition to “are infused with.” There is action in the image. It’s turning towards us, sparked to life by it’s author.

Pound won’t let go; apotheosis intact. His failures buried, he still has the mission. He will go to Europe, learn, pay homage, and keep plying. “Real Imagism has never been tried.”

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]