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Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
by Ezra Pound
Pound's farewell to London and elegy for the war dead — eighteen pages that indict an entire civilization.
- 1920
- 32
About Ezra Pound
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freePart 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.
The story, in more detail
By 1919 Pound had spent a decade making London modern — discovering, editing, and bullying the new poetry into existence — and had concluded that London deserved none of it. His farewell was an eighteen-page poem in rhymed quatrains, modeled with Eliot on Gautier's chiseled stanzas: a mock-elegy for 'E.P.' and a portrait of Mauberley, a minor aesthete polishing medallions while the age demanded — and rewarded — something cheaper.
John Rodker's Ovid Press printed it in 1920 in an edition of about two hundred copies, a deluxe object containing the era's angriest accounting. The war stanzas are its permanent center: the young men who walked eyes-deep in hell for a civilization the poem prices at two gross of broken statues and a few thousand battered books. No document of the generation's fury is more compressed.
Pound left England for Paris within the year, and the poem now reads as the hinge of his career — the last perfect small machine before The Cantos' impossible engine, and his goodbye to being merely brilliant. Eliot judged it a great poem and a document of an epoch; readers intimidated by Pound should start here, where the fury still fits in a pocket.
What's inside
A poem in two sequences, eighteen pages, and the compressed autopsy of a literary civilization. Part one buries 'E.P.' — Pound's own initials on the tombstone — and surveys the London that defeated him: an age that demands plaster images and a prose cinema, editors and patrons sketched in acid miniature (Mr. Nixon, advising young writers to butter reviewers), and, at the center, the great war stanzas — the young men who marched away, what they believed, what they found, and the inventory of what their deaths purchased.
Part two hands the poem to Mauberley himself, the fastidious minor aesthete Pound might have become had he stayed: a maker of exquisite small medallions, drifting out of engagement, out of ambition, and finally out of the world altogether. The sequence closes with the lyric the aesthete leaves behind. Read it as Pound's farewell to England, his self-trial, and the era's angriest ledger — all in a form so tight it can be memorized in an afternoon.
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
From the Journal
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?
Timeline
1919
After a decade making London modern, Pound concludes the city deserved none of it and writes his eighteen-page farewell in rhymed quatrains — a mock-elegy for 'E.P.' with the Great War stanzas at its center.
1920
John Rodker's Ovid Press prints it in an edition of about two hundred copies; Pound leaves England for Paris the same year.
Book editions
- Paperback
- New Directions
- 9780811201278
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
A Moveable Feast
Contains the era's warmest portrait of Pound — read them as call and answer.
Read our take
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Hugh Selwyn Mauberley?
Ezra Pound. The poem was published in 1920, the year he left London for Paris.
What is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley about?
Part self-portrait, part farewell to English literary culture, it follows a minor poet "out of key with his time" through a society that rewards the fake and buries the real.
Why is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley famous?
For its war stanzas — "There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them" — among the most quoted lines of the century, written for the friends who did not come back from the First World War.
How long is the poem?
It is a short sequence — about eighteen pages — written in tight rhymed quatrains.
How does it fit into Pound's life?
It was his farewell to London, where he had spent a decade making poetry modern before concluding the city deserved none of it. He left for Paris the year it appeared.