By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) is a long poem by the American-born modernist poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who described the poem as his ‘farewell to London’. It is partly a response to the First World War, but it is more self-reflexively about the artist or poet’s role in the wake of the war: whereas another great long poem of the early 1920s, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, would address this issue in only an oblique sense, Ezra Pound’s poem tackles the issue more directly, being an analysis of the role of poetry in a world torn apart by conflict and mass carnage, and about Pound’s own struggle to recover the ‘dead art’ of poetry in the years leading up to the war.
So, as well as being about poetry itself, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is also about WWI and the effect of the war and its aftermath on the generation to which Pound belonged (his earlier associate, T. E. Hulme, had been killed in the war in 1917).
But to understand Hugh Selwyn Mauberley it is also necessary to understand Pound’s fondness for adopting personae – this was the title he gave to his second collection of poetry published in 1909. (It’s somewhat amusing that when Pound published Ripostes three years later, the page at the beginning of the book listing ‘Books by the Same Author’ misprinted the title of Personae as ‘Personal’ – try as Pound might, people were intent on taking his poetry personally!)