E.P. Ode pour l'election de sonepulchre

The first section of this long sequence introduces the reader to almost all of the themes and content of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley." The displacement of Pound's own self into a persona, the allusions to literary history, the foreign phrases: all of these typical Poundian elements appear in this first poem.

The section's title means "E. P. Ode for the Selection of His Tomb" (an allusion to the French poet Ronsard) and this section is, in a sense, a eulogy for "E. P.," Pound's aesthete alter ego. Written like most of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" in quatrains (four-line stanzas), this section tells of E. P., who "strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry" by means of resurrecting the old idea of "'the sublime'." The poem's subject is clearly based on Pound himself, "born / In a half savage country" (Pound was born in...