“The End of Art” - ETD - University of Notre Dame

configuration. To reiterate, in assuming that the self is inherited, the historical poetry
becomes in effect a new form of autobiography, even when traditional forms of
autobiography are absent.
The moments when Pound testifies to the failure of inheritance can be heard throughout
his work, but they are often difficult to pick out because we are more accustomed to the
image of him standing on top of inheritance in order to establish the authority of his
enlightened sensibility. But there is an opposing tendency in his writing towards extreme
self-doubt, at times so profound that it echoes Adams’s failure to grasp his relationship to
the world around him. Particularly in Pound’s early poems, a common theme is his
uncertainty about contemporary life. In “On His Own Face in a Glass,” for example, self-
existence is troubled by the many voices that seem to live inside a single speaker:
Oh strange face there in the glass!
O ribald company, O saintly host,
O sorrow-swept my fool,
What answer? O ye myriad
That strive and play and pass,
Jest, challenge, counterlie!
I? I? I?
And ye?
(CE, 34-5)
The poem plays on the feeling of not knowing oneself. A self-reflective act, as might happen
at any time, but as dramatized here by contemplating one’s reflection in the mirror, produces
doubt that any single foundation (“I? I? I?”) underlies selfhood. More fragmentary than
whole, the self appears divisible by a host of others. In this Pound might be taken as ironic
or sincere, or perhaps a bit of both, as if he is mocking those who are self-obsessed to the
point of seeking ontological self-certainty in the bathroom mirror. What the poem does not
provide, however, is any reason, other than by some inborn habit of self-reflection, why a
person would think that he or she is a hodge-podge of conflicting voices. That reason is
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