Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Name: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
ISBN: 978-1-0000-0106-6

by Ezra Pound

Pound's farewell to London and elegy for the war dead — eighteen pages that indict an entire civilization.

Published: 1920
Pages: 32
Setting: London
Era: First World War, The twenties
Shelf rating: 4.3

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The story, briefly

Spoiler-free

Part self-portrait, part exit interview with English literary culture, Mauberley follows a minor poet 'out of key with his time' through a society that rewards the fake and buries the real. At its center stand the war sections — 'There died a myriad / And of the best, among them' — four of the most quoted stanzas of the century, written for friends who did not come back. Pound left for Paris the year it appeared.

Why we recommend it

The war stanzas
'Died some, pro patria, non “dulce” non “et decor”…' — the Great War's bitterest epitaph, and the hinge on which poetry in English turned modern.
Eighteen pages, entrance price included
The Cantos demands months; Mauberley demands an evening and gives you the whole Poundian toolkit — the compression, the masks, the rage at bad art.
The era's mission statement
What Pound demanded here — no ornament, no lies, make it new — is precisely what he then drilled into Hemingway across a Paris café table. Read the poem, then reread the prose it produced.

What this book explores

DisillusionmentWhat's left when the big words — glory, honor, courage — stop working.
The craftWriting about writing — one true sentence at a time.
The war's shadowThe Great War as the wound under everything written after it.

Bring it to book club

How much of Mauberley is Pound mocking himself, and how much is a shield?
Set the war stanzas beside any war passage of Hemingway's. What did prose learn from this?
'The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace' — what would this poem say about our age?

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