Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is Pound’s most important early poem, refining his sense of sequence and structure. Anticipating the form of The Cantos and yet summarizing the issues and outline of works like Sextus Propertius, especially in its social criticism, direct voice, and fragmented narrative, Mauberley presents, in tone and direction, the format and style of Pound’s later development. Essentially the retelling of the poet Mauberley’s disaffection with London and its culture, in response to the calamity caused by World War I, the poem also alludes to such influences as Henry James and Théophile Gautier. In James, Pound admired the depiction of atmosphere and impressions; in Gautier, a certain “hardness,” which he prophesized in 1917, celebrating verse that was “austere, direct, free from emotional slither” (LE, 12). The final poem in the Mauberley sequence, “Medallion,” thought to be by Mauberley himself, exhibits the hardness Pound admired in Gautier’s Émaux et Camées (1852).
Mauberley is a suite of eighteen poems in two parts, the first running from “Ode” to “Envoi (1919).” The second begins with the title “Mauberley (1920),” from section I to “Medallion.” On the title page of the poem in Personae (1926), Pound included a footnote, since deleted: “The sequence is so distinctly a farewell to London that the reader who chooses to regard this as an exclusively American edition may as well omit it and turn at once to [Homage to Sextus Propertius].” The epigraph from the Roman poet Nemesianus, “the heat calls us into the shade,” and the subtitle “Life and Contacts” were omitted in Selected Poems (1949) but reintroduced in a revised version appearing in Diptych Rome-London (1958), although the subtitle is reversed to read “Contacts and Life,” which Pound told his publisher, James Laughlin, was “the actual order of the subject matter” (Ruthven, 127).
Early readers of the poem had difficulty distinguishing between Pound and the persona of Mauberley. Were they the same or not? Pound argued they were different, but readers persisted in linking the two. Another issue was the construction of the work: were the sections linked or simply arbitrarily joined together? Answers can be found through identifying Pound’s sources, largely French. Indeed, Pound models his work on the rhythms of Gautier and Bion, poets he had recently reread for his long article “A Study in French Poets,” published in the Little Review (February 1918). Pound essentially creates in the person of Mauberley, who appears only in the latter half of the poem and in contrast to Pound, “a mask of the contemporary aesthete to show what the minor artist could expect from the England of the day” (Espey, 14). The poet’s place in society is the focus.
Beginning with an ironic “Ode” on Pound himself, the poet then shifts to his own age, exposing what in society prevents the artist from fully realizing his own potential because of commercialization and money, which has substituted for aesthetics. Democracy has also turned toward self-corruption (II, III). Sections IV and V are the climax of Pound’s denunciation, underscored by World War I and the sacrifice of the young dying for a diseased tradition. He then examines the sources of this degeneration, locating it in the overpowering of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics by the official morality of Gladstone and Ruskin (see the “Yeux Glauques” and “Siena Mi Fe’” sections). A list of Pound’s, and possibly Mauberley’s, contacts follows (“Brennbaum,” “Mr. Nixon”), including an educated woman who inherits sterile traditions she does not understand (XI). Pound then examines himself in relation to the fashionable circles of literary London and realizes he is unacceptable (XII) and bows out with a love lyric, “Envoi (1919),” which contradicts the surface judgments of the critics in the opening “Ode.”
Mauberley emerges as an individual in the second half of the poem, entitled “Mauberley (1920),” where each of the sections opens with an apparent parallel drawn from the first section, although it develops its thematic opposite. Mauberley, however, is inadequate, displaying his limits as an artist (I), realizing that although life may offer him something through active passion, he hesitates and is unable to conform to the age (II, and “The Age Demanded” section). These acknowledgments lead to subjective reveries that engulf him as he drifts to his death (IV), leaving his only work—“Medallion”—behind, an ironic reworking of the “Envoi” that concluded part one of the poem and marked the disappearance of Pound to Paris. But the restatements of phrases in the “Mauberley” section of the poem from part one are thematic variants rather than direct extensions, balancing and ordering what had formerly been seen as disconnected fragments. Even typography contrasts the two parts of the larger work: Pound uses Greek in the first part for his Greek quotations and tags; in the second (“Mauberley (1920)”), he transliterates the Greek into Roman letters.
Complex but revealing, emphasizing the disparity between surface and foundation, between idea and action, Mauberley contains various links with The Cantos, including the theme of the poet as Odysseus (Mauberley and The Cantos each opens with this), which functions in both works as a unifying narrative thread (see Cantos I, XX, and XLVII). The abrupt breaking off of the twelfth poem in Mauberley, and the coda following the asterisks, anticipate the technical surface of The Cantos, where such typographical disruptions culminate in the introduction of Chinese ideographs (Cantos LII-LXXI et al.) and even a musical score (Canto LXXV). Mauberley also introduces a series of figures who will reappear in The Cantos, from Homer, Dante, and Browning to Pindar, Catullus, and Sappho, as well as Henry James, Pisanello and Edward FitzGerald, translator of The Rubaiyat. War, inimical to both poems, expands to a shared indictment of England.
Pound did not forget Mauberley: imprisoned by the U.S. Army at the Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa in 1945, he recalled in detail the period the poem evoked when he composed The Pisan Cantos, directly quoting from the earlier work. Mauberley encompasses many of Pound’s early enthusiasms—Browning, Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelites, The Rubaiyat—as well as his classical interests, but it also looks forward to the range and breadth of The Cantos. With Propertius, Mauberley justifies the artist in times unsympathetic to his art, while The Cantos, even the early ones, demonstrate his necessary place in the modern age.
“You will have to go a long way round if you want to avoid them,” Basil Bunting wrote in his poem “On the Fly-leaf of Pound’s Cantos,” addressing them like the Alps. But for many readers, The Cantos still remain a mountainous poem, filled with crevices, steep ascents, and glorious views, despite Pound’s admonition that “there is no mystery about the Cantos, they are the tale of the tribe—give Rudyard [Kipling] credit for his use of the phrase” (GK, 194). Pound first thought of his epic, “a poem including history,” as early as 1904 or 1905, but did not begin drafting cantos until 1915 (ABC, 46). “Three Cantos of a Poem of Some Length,” the early cantos, first appeared in Poetry magazine in 1917, but almost immediately after their publication, Pound began to revise them, asking Eliot for editorial advice. Eliot told him to eliminate redundancies and explanatory passages and remove personal pronouns to “impersonalize” the text, making its transitions more elliptical. Pound followed this form of revision throughout the composition of the entire poem, preferring to call several of the later volumes “drafts,” as in A Draft of XVI Cantos for the Beginning of A Poem of Some Length (1925) or A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930).
No section of the work experienced as much revision, however, as “Three Cantos.” In fact, a portion of Canto III would form the opening of Canto I, while the later Canto VIII would become a large portion of Canto II. Pound was finding his way. More specifically, in 1923, Pound took part of Canto III, his translation of the nekuia passage from The Odyssey (Book IX, “The Book of the Dead”), and made it the opening of a revised Canto I and redistributed other passages to provide a more dramatic, in medias res beginning. But “Three Cantos,” and Cantos IV through VIII, record the poet’s original conception and impetus for the poem, which he acknowledged to be digressive and abbreviated:the first 11 Cantos are preparation of the palette. I have to get down all the colours or elements I want for the poem. Some perhaps too enigmatical
ly and abbreviatedly. I hope to bring them into some sort of design and architecture later (SL, 180).
Beginning with Browning’s Sordello, “Three Cantos”—the so-called Ur-cantos—develop a centralizing consciousness (later to be replaced with a fragmented perception expressed through juxtaposition) by using the poem to establish a dialogue with Browning in Pound’s search for form, complaining that Browning hadWorked out new form, the meditative,
Semi-dramatic, semi-epic story,
And we will say: What’s left for me to do?
Whom shall I conjure up; who’s my Sordello [?]
(“Three Cantos,” I)
The answer, of course, is plenty, and Pound proceeds in the “Three Cantos” to build a poetic world around the myth of Odysseus, because no historical literary figure or model could satisfy his demands. He would label this process of image making the Greek phantastikon, which he describes at the close of Canto I: And I shall claim;
Confuse my own phantastikon,
Or say the filmy shell that circumscribes me
Contains the actual sun;
confuse the thing I see
With the actual gods behind me?
Are they gods behind me?
But historical figures remain subject to the imaginative metamorphoses of the poet’s phantastikon, merging and emerging with the archetype of a mythical hero free from historical reconstruction : for Pound, this is Odysseus. In the first of “Three Cantos,” he also establishes his style: “set out your matter/As I do, in straight simple phrases.” How to make the long poem both an epic and modern is the challenge Pound sets for himself. “Three Cantos” is his first answer. Experiment characterizes all of these early efforts plus his realization that the heroes of the past will not do—or must be reappraised and re-presented to suit the modern situation.
More specifically, the later half of “Three Cantos, I” introduces motifs developed not only by the “Three Cantos” as a whole but later Cantos as well (Bush, 117, 135-41). “Three Cantos, II” begins with a half-regretful soliloquy, “Leave Casella,” abandoning lyric poetry for the epic. The narrative technique shifts as the persona of the narrator recedes from the center into a less prominent speaking voice. No monologue but a series of unrelated vignettes emerges; the narrator discourses with images of various joyless ghosts, each presenting a form of spiritual blindness. The theme is “drear waste” and shows Pound’s technique of layering the vital past and the empty present into an extended sequence. At play are the techniques of Imagism.
A progression of historical images illustrating the fading power of the gods ends the Canto; worship disappears as Western culture ages and becomes more commercial. “Three Cantos, III” moves more securely to Homer and Odysseus, recalling Pound’s copy of Andreas Divus’s Latin translation of Homer, which would become the opening of the revised Canto I, Pound offering his own “rough meaning” in English of Divus’s Latin.
Cantos IV through VIII push the poem further, moving into the world of ragged textual surfaces and disjointed history but taking Pound closer to an emerging conception of the entire work. Canto IV, published in October 1919, was the first he regarded as capable of standing in the finished sequence, although he revised it slightly. “Three Cantos” orients the reader in psychological space; Canto IV in a flatter, historical space. Events, literary allusions, and the poet coexist now on the same plane. Pieces of text abut one another without an established context set by a single narrator or consciousness. Now the Orient, not Browning, organizes the poem. Japanese Noh drama provides the schema, a kind of theater without drama, using only a change of mask to mark a shift in dialogue. Scenery is minimal; the action is verbal; the language incisive. The drama Takasago, read by Pound while composing Canto IV, is central in conception and form for the new confidence and direction represented by this Canto (Albright, 65-67).
Cantos IV and V still celebrate the glamour of troubadour adultery, with short segments spliced together to reveal common themes. Peire de Maensac, a troubadour described in Canto V, may be a dreitz hom (good man), but he is still devious as he makes off with Tierci’s wife. But Canto V is also a departure, as Pound introduces a secondary intelligence, in this case Benedetto Varchi, a historian who considers whether the murder of Alessandro de’ Medici in 1557 by his cousin was petty revenge or a noble act to save Florence from tyranny. Pound enters history in this Canto, although it is uncertain, insecure, and baffling. Contrasting with the identifiable myths of Canto IV are the “facts” of Canto V, which are unreliable. Canto V also elaborates voices other than those of the poets. History itself begins to speak in the poem. Canto VI, for example, is the voice of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour telling how his music seduced the wife of his patron, Eblis III. The voices of old men who mutter rather than speak fill Canto VII: “Dry casques of departed locusts/speaking a shell of speech” (VII).
Between 1920 and 1921, Pound wrote no Cantos, concentrating instead on Mauberley. He also wrote an opera, Le Testament, devising his own music for texts by François Villon; he also edited The Waste Land. These experiences changed the shape of The Cantos. The “impersonations”—the voices Pound employs in Cantos V through VIII—marking his search through history and myth to locate an authentic voice diminish, although in Canto VIII, published in The Dial in May 1922, he still maintains strong narrative control. Retelling moments from mythical history, he dramatizes as he juxtaposes, drawing on Anglo-Saxon constructions as much as Dante. But classical writers set the diction, the source texts and incidents in the Canto. Homer and Dante, in fact, become the two hovering figures not only in Canto VIII, (which would be radically revised in 1923—1925 to become Canto II), but also throughout the remainder of the entire poem. Suggesting the competition between two worlds, that of poet and audience and the classical and the modern, is the line “Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men’s voices,” describing Homer’s skill and yet neglect. In Acoetus’s narration of the adventures of Dionysus, Pound brings a liveliness and drama to the poem not present in the earlier quest to create a new Sordello. The dialogue of Canto VIII is never between two poets (Pound and Browning) but between the dramatized lives of figures like Acoetus and Dionysus. Pound recognized this new energy and placed the Canto second in his revised structure, beginning the new version with an admission and a challenge—“Hang it all, Robert Browning,/there can be but the one ‘Sordello’ ”—and then leaping to the So-shu, seal, and Picasso passage of the original Canto VIII, reworking material from approximately line 15 onward. As the poetic source of the new Canto II, Canto VIII has a crucial place in the evolution of the completed poem.
Pound’s early prose similarly redefined his relation with tradition at the same time he formulated a new aesthetic. “What I Feel About Walt Whitman” (1909) is an early attempt to clarify his connection to an American literary past, extended by “The Wisdom of Poetry” (1912), a statement of the value of poetry as an act of liberation achieved through language. He amplifies this through a series of essays on select influences on his work, notably “Psychology and Troubadours” (1912) and “Troubadours—Their Sorts and Conditions” (1913). His essays “Imagisme” (1912) and “The Serious Artist” (1913) clarify his poetics at the same time he glances back in “How I Began” (1913). But Pound always manages to look forward when he looks back, as in “The Tradition” (1914), which focuses on Greece and Provence, and “A Retrospect” (1918), a collection of earlier pieces on Imagism and artistic commitment. “The Prose Tradition in Verse” (1914) strikes a new note as he begins with Yeats and then moves to the value of Hueffer’s (later Ford Madox Ford) poetry, not because he has a lyrical gift but because “of his insistence upon clarity and precision, upon the prose tradition; in brief, upon efficient writing—even in verse.”
“Vorticism” (1914) and “Chinese Poetry” (1918) are further important topics in Pound’s essays; so is the startling work of James Joyce. Two essays on Joyce, in fact, appear here, one dealing with the publication of A Po
rtrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), the other with Ulysses (1922). Both were texts that Pound felt radically revised the novel as it was then understood.
Perhaps the most significant prose work Pound published up to 1923 was “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” In early October 1913, Ernest Fenollosa’s widow met the energetic young Pound, who was striding through literary London with his bold ideas and new forms. Mary Fenollosa hoped to appoint Pound her late husband’s literary executor. Pound, not an Orientalist but a poet, impressed Mrs. Fenollosa, whose husband went to Japan in 1878 after graduating from Harvard, continuing his studies at Cambridge University, and spending a year at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He first taught at the Imperial University in Tokyo, where he began an intensive study of Japanese art. After eight years, Fenollosa helped found the Tokyo Fine Arts Academy and the Imperial Museum, acting as its director in 1888. He also prepared the first inventory of Japan’s national treasures. He returned to Boston in 1890 to become curator of Oriental art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but scandal over his divorce and immediate remarriage to the writer Mary McNeill Scott in 1895 forced his resignation. Two years later, he returned to Japan but in 1900 made his way back to America and then on to London, where he died in 1908. Mrs. Fenollosa liked Pound; she appointed him Fenollosa’s literary executor, and passed on to him sixteen or so notebooks from her husband that concentrated on three subjects : Japanese drama, Chinese verse, and the Chinese writing system.