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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...
This section contains 5,770 words (approx. 20 pages at 300 words per page) |
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