Hugh Selwyn Mauberley A Study In Composition

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

"The real meditation is...the meditation on one's identity.Ah, voil ? une chose !! You try it . You try finding out why you are you and not somebody else.And who in the blazes are you anyhow ? Ah, voil? une chose !"

Conceived as a poem with formal parts so unified as to subserve the whole—complete and processing a certain magnitude—Mauberley reveals its virtues and powers in composition and devices of representation by which the poet is able to ‘imitate’ or render in expressive form the subtle, refined workings of a unique sensibility. 35 Our idea of the sensibility to which we attribute the feelings and antinomies of imaginative logic articulated in the poem is undoubtedly an inference which depends on our grasp of the structure of the poem itself and of Pound's recourse to metonymic devices. The mask in itself is a metonym; unlike metaphor, metonymy has a "horizontal" motif of moving across time, and "looks" like a hologram, that is, a part of something represents the whole. Working with metonymy, Pound needed a larger expanse of time to fill in the gap between the two epochs; his mask thus, consists of two persons and it is alternately Mauberley and Pound, whose personality is augmented by Pound's sense of Mauberley. Once assuming the mask, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine exactly who speaks the various parts of the poem, yet, in the following part of such an attempt will be made. What is truly remarkable is that, for Pound, sensibility is yet another means of transfiguring personae or masks in order to actualize a complex harmony of vision. In Mauberley, the speaking voice syncopates in fugal arrangement the splenetic, the maudlin, the serious and the sublime and style accordingly conforms in tone—confessional, ironic, pompous—to the shifts of personalities articulated in the intricate variety and the highly allusive, elliptical mode of representation in the poem.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a sequence of eighteen poems in two parts, of which the first thirteen (Part I) are concerned with Pound, the last five (Part II) with his invented hedonist poetaster, Mauberley. Poem i is a funerary ‘Ode’ on E.P., the age’s epitaph on the disappearing Pound; poems ii to xii are his reply to the age; ’Envoi’, the thirteenth poem, is Pound’s poetic riposte and farewell. Part II is subtitled ‘Mauberley (1920)’, and takes his representative aesthete through the same literary world as Pound has just encountered; all Mauberley can manage is the final poem ‘Medallion’, an aestheticized version of the same experience that produced Pound’s glowing ‘Envoi’.

Critical opinion concerning the formal organization of the poem has in general been diffuse, impressionistic or ingeniously assured—in any case, unable to define cogently the formal unity of the multiple elements contained within the architectonic rhythm of the whole utterance. While there is agreement about the themes of aesthetic revolt, the polemic of self-justification, and the rhetoric of elegant irony, we still lack a clear and precise elucidation of the organizing principle behind the poem. F.R. Leavis’ comments, for example, betray a simplistic opacity: "The poems together from one poem, a representative experience of life—tragedy, comedy, pathos, and irony". 36 In this synoptic gloss, Leavis fails to distinguish the speaker of the first poem from that on the rest. Hugh Kenner, by contrast, is infinitely more suggestive about Pound’s impersonality: his style is "an effacement of the personal accidents of the perceiving medium in the interests of accurate registration of moeurs contemporaines". 37 As such, it is can be taken as a metaphor, for the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another, as an abstraction viewed in terms of a more well-defined model. It seems that Kenner's actual explanation yields just a fragment of the total pattern and orchestration of the various motifs and topics, partly due to the fact that language and its symbolic resources are emphasized in Kenner’s modern exegeses to the neglect of the purposes for which language is only a means. But he is just right because while Mauberley, as he points out, may still be virtually unread, the perception of his depth requires a prior grasp of the subsuming pattern, the structure which gives orientation and perspective for such complex details of meaning one may plumb in its depths.

The structural problem arises because the title misleads readers into thinking that the whole sequence is about Mauberley, albeit poem i, ‘E.P. Ode pour l’élection de son sepulchre’, is clearly about Pound. Other readers have thought that the whole sequence is from the pen of Mauberley, but if all Part I were by Mauberley—, a possibility which cannot be disapproved—then Mauberley’s recounted experiences would then have exactly coincided with Pound’s and this may further suggest that poems ii to xii are Mauberley’s life and contacts whereas it is crucial to recognize that they are Pound’s. However, in spite of these confusions, the overwhelming argument is that Pound clearly divides the sequence into two parts and entitles the second part ‘Mauberley’. After the first poem in Part I—the funeral. Ode on E.P.—the ensuing eleven poems are vigorous and critical, whereas the whole of Part II parodies passivity and anesthesia. From this it is clear enough that there is a contrast intended between the active Pound of Part I and the aesthete Mauberly in Part II, a contrast enforced by their two versions of the same event offered in ‘Envoi’ and ‘Medallion’: Pound responds to a woman singing by offering his own song, which echoes both the enchantment of the English lyric poetry and its collapse, whereas poor Mauberley sees something that reminds him of art objects and drift finally into an aesthetic analysis of the singer’s ‘face-oval’.

More recently, critic San Juan Jr. starting from the idea that Pound himself demanded a refocusing of attention on the underlying forces that determine poetic structure, in his terminology, "major form", has suggested that in interpreting Mauberley, the emphasis should be on the shaping principle which measures and adjusts the possibilities of material and technique toward the realization of an intelligible form. Any work of art is a compound of freedom and order. It is perfectly obvious that art hangs between chaos on the one side and mechanics on the other. A pedantic insistence upon detail tends to drive out "major form". A firm hold on major form makes for a freedom of detail. In painting, men intent to restore this sense is branded as "revolution". It is revolution in the philological sense of term 38 .In other words, according to him, explicating the poem on the basis of its organizing principle, of the thematic argument which determines the dialectic interplay of incidents, character, thought and linguistic properties crystallized in style, the meaning of the poem would be then formulated from the inside, since our knowledge of what the poet’s ends are would tell us by inference the means which he employed to accomplish his ends. I might add that these propositions about critical method will make sense only as they show structuralist efficiency in the process of textual and technical analyses.

Like Eliot’s, Crane’s and Yeat’s song cycles, Pound’s Mauberley is a sequence; it differs from the classical elegy, ode or epic in that it has no fixed form and its generous structure is made up of more or less self-sufficient units, each contributing conceptually and stylistically to the organic life of the whole. Critic M.L. Rosenthal compares Pound’s sequences, Mauberley and The Cantos, with mural painting being very specific about the order of parts, which is as necessary as the poet can make it from any convenient point within it; the sequence, he claims , like a mural painting will rearrange itself around whatever in it initially seizes upon our attention. 39 It therefore becomes obvious why most readers would find the first part of Mauberley more quickly available than the fourth and fifth poems, and probably the "Envoi", less demanding that the rest. Similary 13 and 45 are certainly among the most readily intelligible of The Cantos.

It has become already clear then , that in order to solve the structural problem of the poem, Pound had to maintain control of these associations; in doing so, he was pushed closer to the metonymic pole by precisely these innovative strategies of reforming an excessively metaphoric poetic tradition. Displaying a metonymic behaviour, he chose to connect topics by means of external contiguities in time and space, therefore the relationships among the parts do no longer derive from patterns of similarity, but from temporal and spatial associations due to proximity, subordination and coordination. This might offer us a new perspective, according to which Mauberley need not be perhaps taken as a whole; wholeness, preconceived is a bracket into which the mind is not compelled to thrust; the parts, taken seriatim, establish parallels, sequences, connections and even seem to conspire, in spite of the prejudiced mind, to produce an aggregate better, that is even larger, than the bracket. It is a matter of adding and the addition will not be exhaustive because it wells up naturally in cumulative, concentric structures of poetic moods.

This is no doubt an admission of the difficult nature of Mauberley’s structure; 40 there are perhaps elements of confusion or supersubtlety in Pound’s conception as well as in his presentation of the poem; the desire for a consistent and clear model of fictional structure for the reader to hold in his mind, as in ‘point-of-view’-criticism of the novel, is inappropriate and hardly applicable here; whether the hero is Pound or Mauberley, the poems in series make a great impact. In fact, Pound wrote to Hardy: "If—as in the case of Mauberley’s own amorous adventure, I compress Henry James’s novel into two pages—even unsuccessfully—I have the right to some of the attention that would have gone to the 298 pages omitted". 41 Mauberley is indeed a learned, allusive and difficult poem which shows at this point how profoundly Pound wished to reclaim for poetry areas which the lyric tradition lost to the novel in the nineteenth century in areas of social, public and cultural life.

In point of meaning, critics have got into some terrible tangles in interpreting Mauberley and complex ‘readings’ of the poem have quite sufficiently attended its allusiveness; commended in literary circles by Eliot and later, to universities by Leavis, its success with critics perhaps led to too much being expected of it; some have found it a confession of failure, much like the other "impersonal" The Waste Land, some have catalogued it as a dissection of society because this is its ‘presumed’ message whereas an important fraction have agreed that the polemic of the poem is that the finer life of our society, and especially its art, is poisoned by universal commercialization of values. The remainder of the poem which will feed on none of these thematic streams is bracketed out and can be at best welcomed as unintelligible but nevertheless cultural sophistication.

A reading of the poem was suggested by Davie, who proposed that the different personae in Mauberley be deemed functions of Pound’s sensibility because "despite the short-circuiting nexus or asyndetons in syntax and thought, each persona is never exactly equivalent to the poet’s mind in its isolation and integral place in the sequence". 42 Therefore, the totality of the poem may be considered identical with a process of awareness occurring in Pound’s mind and in this sense "Envoi" with its rich lyrical cadence affirms a part of the ideal poetic self whose orientation is toward the complementing and reconciling possibilities of the future. Unlike the mock-elegy of the "Ode", which condemns the poet in terms of the past without any hope of appeal, "Envoi" confronts the finitude of existence and looks backward, prophetic in adventurousness, asserting the power of the poet to resurrect the splendid past and reisntate what time has destroyed in the realm of eternal permanence. Coming back to the ‘Ode’, it seems that Pound’s critical sense of himself, however ironically expressed, lends the sequence a dimension suggested more diffusely in Propertius. Here he admits some inapropriateness in his earlier heroic manner; his hubris (‘Capaneus’) and his obstinate Odyssean susceptibility to and cultivation of beauties that lie off the straight and narrow path of return to his ‘true Penelope’, Flaubert. This last is a doubtly ironic line, as Kenner pointed out, for the speaker inbends ‘Flaubert’ to indicate a sterile aestheticism, whereas Pound sees Flaubert not as the martyr to art but as the painter of the essential reality of his time—the ‘histoire morale contemporaine’. 43 This last quatrain is an equally ironic testament, as Pound has been so deeply affected by what is feebly referred to as "the march of events"; at last, he is leaving this obstinate island for his destiny as a Flaubertian realist.

Poem ii, in its analysis of contemporary demand, for Mauberley proceeds to place the celebrated figure in relation to his milieu and the ‘age’ demanded exactly the opposite of what Pound intended to achieve, is virtually a withering reply, a classic statement 44 ‘the obscure reveries / of the inward gaze’ are taken to refer not only to Plarr but Eliot’s Prufrock. It accounts for the futility of the poet’s existence: his works ‘still-born’, he becomes useless, later associated with the image of ‘pickled foetuses’.

The more general critique of contemporary society in poem iii seems to be lacking in the personal authority and drama of the opening. Less a jubilant praiser than a mordant mourner, Mauberley registers the deplorable decay of honour and virtue and criticizes the age in sharply juxtaposed contrasting imagery; the wit crackles in the ‘tawdry cheapness’ and rises to something much finer in the famous last quatrain when Mauberley—Pound parodies Pindar’s invocation. On the whole, poem iii, by the standards of its exceptionally solid predecessor, is regarded by Espey and Alexander as a rather patchy treatment of too vast a theme; however, had the sequence been conceived as a cinematic montage, poems ii to xii would have been incorporated so as the seek to diagnose the malady and explain the death of the poet.

Poems iv and v are very striking; poem iv locates corruption and denounces the perversion of ideals embodied in the sanctity of the homeland by the sacrifice of lives in meaningless mass-slaughter; but despite the heightening effect of this generous, sincere lament, much of the thought seems to be, in no discreditable sense, purely naive and overpowered by events. Poem v strikes the balance and converts Mauberley from a grudging obituarist to an outraged spirit instigating revolt by incantatory repetitions. The demands of the age receive exaggerated and abusive response in the loss of innocence and potentiality and reduces all human purpose into dust. Mauberley painstakingly discovers in disillusionment the vain delusive cause which mocks the value of sacrifice and deprives life of all sacramental import; withdrawing into memory seems the only alternative out of the impasse.

Poem vi incorporates in the figure of the female victim the larger scheme of transformation in the whole poem. 45 and is mainly an epigram on the Pre-Raphaelites, a brilliant foreshortening of the effect of a hypocritical official morality which represents and distorts the lives of artists. Swinburne and Rosetti are referred to by a Cambridge critic of this passage as ‘two poets remarkable (to us) for their meretriciousness’, a remark indicative of Pound’s continuing relevance. 46

Poem vii resumes the elegiac but detached, condensed critique of a hermetic aestheticism founded on Flaubert’s code of be not juste and the anti-bourgeois policy of the French Symbolistes. 47 Pound’s even-toned recapitulation is refracted and sustained by a metonymic display of splintered immediacies of detail and gives proof of the arbitrary, shifting modus vivendi that the Nineties adopted amidst universal anarchy and disorder. Aesthetics, exemplified by Pound’s assimilation of "influences", appears to be the only hope for restoring a sacramental ambience to the industrial, dehumanized atmosphere of the years around World War I. On the whole, this seems to be a funny poem, but ‘the flippancy’, as Leavis said, ‘subserves a tragic effect’. 48

Poems viii, ix and x render with impressionistic vigour the countenance of a hudicrous "clerk", or connoisseur—intellectual, Brennbaum who appears as Pound’s nemesis in so far as he represents the futility of looking backward and the mechanical efficiency of mere formal correctness. Critics have agreed that this unpleasant reference to Max Beerbohm (who was not a Jew, incidentally) conserved something of the aesthetic and irreverent tradition of the Nineties behind his ‘limpid eyes’ and ‘infant’s face’, even if at too great a cost.

Poems xi and xii complete the sequence and bring the review up to date; Pound’s predilection for mock—tentative words— ‘precisely’, ‘somewhat’, ‘uncertain’, ‘possible’, become predictably Prufrockian and the satire, however accurate, rather obvious; As Espey suggests, the poet finally has to crown himself under the asterisks. 49 It seems that, Mauberley’s physical self as free agent accepts the circumscribed realm of action imposed by a degenerate milieu; but if he can perceive the possibility of living in another manner—the stylist and the dead Pound of the ‘Ode’ offer alternatives—it is because he has a virile spirit capable of epic dignity and tragic purposiveness, a spirit which does not share the mood of resigned futility and his later castrating numbness, nor participate in the body’s commitments. Yet, his "soul" sent on a journey to an Augustan haven of imagination only intensifies his awareness that such a haven cannot be found anywhere today.

‘Go, lovely Rose’ is the ‘song of Lawes’ referred to in the ‘Envoi’, and the rose evokes the Tudor lyric tradition, stretching back to Sappho’s roses. The ‘Envoi’ is presumably meant as a farewell rose for the English lyric Muse to add, not to her Musem diadem, but to her living bouquet; it is a wreath for the English lyric tradition and reverses the verdict of the ‘Ode’; in so doing the question still lingers on: What adjunct to the Muses’ diadem has England presented since 1919?

Part II reads as a pendant to Part I; in a condensed part, Pound modifies and enhances by specific demonstration the attitudes supporting the manner of expression in the first part. Kins or brothers by elective affinity, Mauberley and Pound share many interests in common, but Mauberley is distinguished by the kind of art-form he has chosen to concentrate on, announced in Poem I. Poems II, III, IV relate the progressive extinction of Mauberley’s spirit, particularly poem III which centers on Mauberley’s rejection of the age’s demands, thus confirming his sympathy for Pound the dead persona-poet in the ‘Ode’.

Just as Poems II to XII of the first part delivered over the poet’s corpse, miraculously revived the poet so that he could sing his ‘Envoi’, so here Poems I to IV succeed in effect, summoning the spirit of the drowned Mauberley back to life in order to recite ‘Medallion’, his time ‘epilogue’ and his humble ‘adjunct to the Muses’ diadem’.

Conceived as an epitaph as well as a last will and testament, "Medallion" aptly illuminates the surface complexity, the overall pattern, of the poem. The principle of coherence in the poem lies in the process involving the transfiguration of Venus Anadyomene’s face, seen in a reproduction, into a dazzling vision. The depth of Mauberley’s inward gaze has succeeded in embodying beauty in a medium perfectly indivisible with the content of his intuition. The verbal medallion redeems the second part just as "Envoi" redeems the whole of the poem. Plunged in "porcelain revery", Mauberley insulates himself against the "profane intrusions" of the blasphemous hollow world. Avoiding direct confrontation with reality, Mauberley sought only the profile; but now nature, in her guise of Anadyomene the goddess of that art draws it energy and life-enhancing virtu (the emphasis on light accords with Pound’s concept of paradise in the later Cantos) from the erotic experience itself which lies at the core of the imagination.

With ‘Envoi’, Pound himself slights the modality of expression to pure lyrical assertion of art’s transcending life. In the second part of the poem, such a transcendence is projected as immanent in Mauberley’s "porcelain revery" which fuses vision and artifice together by the use of particular metonymic substitutions. The second part functions thus as the validating framework of the first part, for here Mauberley’s character is drawn in terms of his behaviour, his decisions, which are needed to clarify his utterance of Poems I to XII of the first part. The reading of the poem, as a whole, is indicative of Pound's exquisite refinement in the choosing of his strategies to support his ever fresher poetic moods; in a constantly fruitful glide along the two language poles, I believe the poem tends to disclose much of its too challenging at times allusiveness.

Celebrating the symbolic death and rebirth through art and two poets in a reflexive mode, the whole sequence of Mauberley may be seen thus from one point of view as an extended epitaph to the tombstone of art at a specific time and place England around 1920. On a larger perspective, it has been suggested, the sequence is organized around the ideea of life’s affirmation by art as varied personae—the ethos in the mode of disclosing its formal wholeness—according to the tensions and resolutions of Propertius' organizing incondescendent consciousness. 50