SOURCE: "Mauberley and His Critics," in ELH: English Literary History, Vol. 57, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 961-76.

In the following essay, Miller offers a reexamination of critical dispute surrounding Hugh Selwyn Mauberley from its publication to the present. "Once Pound's greatest success," writes Miller, "it is today perhaps his least respected poem."

I

Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is, one must hasten to say, an overconsidered poem. Disagreed about for half a century, interpreted in contradictory fashions, whoever speaks of it has to begin by explaining how he reads it. Once Pound's greatest success, it is today perhaps his least respected poem. [T. S.] Eliot, one recalls, thought whatever else he was sure of, he was sure of Mauberley; Donald Davie, himself very intelligent, tells us that it only appeals to "thin and constricted and rancorously distrustful sensibilities." There's a difference of opinion to think about.

Such disagreements do have...