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

―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narrator, imaginatively ―murders‖ the creative fiction of the
belletrist E.P., we are asked to conceive of ourselves, like Dickinson‘s readers of
―Misery‖ believing that publication itself has made E.P. "not a speaker, not an "I," not a
consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self." This was the fate
Pound imagined for himself were he to remain writing in London. Playing with the titles
and names of this poem (it was first published without Pound‘s signature in 1920 as the
de facto work of ―E.P.‖) allowed Pound to at once express this fate and escape it.
Explanations that depend upon the presence of the author‘s ―impersonal‖ finger for their
entry into the hermeneutic circle of Mauberley miss the way Pound‘s ―de-personalized‖
narrator, E.P., allows Pound to express the reality of this fate as a fictional creation,
hanging what was to be his fate on the title ―Mauberley.‖
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