TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

CHAPTER FOUR:
DE-PERSONALIZATION AND E.P.‘S FICTIONAL CREATIVITY IN
―HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY‖
The worst muddle they make is in failing to see that Mauberley
buries E.P. in the first poem; gets rid of all his troublesome
energies. (T. Connolly, ‗Further Notes on Mauberley‘, Accent
(1956), 59; quoted Brooker, A Student’s Guide, p.188)
―That total fake, Ezra Pound.‖
– Vladimir Nabakov
Perhaps no greater red-herring has been uttered by a poet about his work. Pound‘s
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, much like ―Homage to Sextus Propertius,‖ involves itself with
the activity of poets creating epitaphs for other poets. We over-interpret Pound‘s meaning
if we believe that E.P., troublesome energies and all, is missing from the poem. This
chapter involves itself with understanding the way names and titles suggest that what
Pound achieves in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a de-personalized narrative, one
attributable to the fictional creativity of ―E.P.,‖ the poem‘s solitary speaker. E.P.,
imaginatively buried by ―Mauberley,‖ is what the poem allows Pound both to become
and leave behind, as his avatar for that natural history that belonged to the artistic and
cultural milieu of London in 1919, a milieu that he had come to disdain and for which he
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