In the following essay excerpt, Witemeyer examines the artist portraits Pound creates as an "aesthetic heritage for Mauberley." The first major work in which Pound expresses this embittered social vision is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).

Pound wrote the sequence as a poetic farewell to London on the eve of his departure for Paris. In it, he adumbrates the reasons why, after a residence of twelve years, he no longer finds England congenial to art and artists.

His analysis is complex and uncompromising. To begin with, his formidable style makes few concessions to the common reader. Those tackling the poem for the first time may well come away with little more than a general impression of angry urgency and bitter irony. A major source of difficulty is the extreme condensation of the images and allusions, which often imply discursive arguments made elsewhere in Pound's writings but not repeated here...