Barnhisel directs the Writing Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In this essay, Barnhisel discusses the use of the image of the medallion in the second half of Pound's poem and how it prefigures Pound's later interests in the confluence of economics and literature.

In his 1928 introduction to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot writes that "I am sure of 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,' whatever else I am sure of." "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is generally seen as the poem that takes Pound from his early adventures in poetry to his mature lifelong endeavor of The Cantos. Admirers of Pound's epic poem praise "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" as a prefiguration of the methods and subject matter of The Cantos, while critics who see The Cantos as a failure laud "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" for its traces of imagism, Vorticism, and Pound's other early...