Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Ezra Pound
Pound's farewell to London and elegy for the war dead — eighteen pages that indict an entire civilization.
Poetry
The modernist poem — compressed, allusive, and out to remake the art from the syllable up.
Poetry was modernism's front line. Before the novels caught up, the poets — with Ezra Pound as drill sergeant — had already declared war on ornament: no filler words, no automatic rhymes, no emotion announced instead of embodied. 'Make it new' was Pound's slogan, and his editing pencil enforced it on a generation, most famously on The Waste Land, which he cut nearly in half.
The era's poetry ranges from the perfect small machine (the Imagist poem, two lines doing a paragraph's work) to the deliberately impossible project (The Cantos, a poem attempting to contain all of history). Both extremes share the same conviction: that compression is honesty, and that a reader given the exact image needs no instructions about what to feel.
If verse intimidates you, start with Hugh Selwyn Mauberley — eighteen pages, and its war stanzas explain the entire generation's fury faster than any novel on our shelves.
Who to read for it
The poetry we recommend
The 'poem including history' — fifty years, 116 cantos, and modernism's most magnificent ruin.
Other styles on the shelf
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