From 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberly';
From 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberly'; - meaning Summary
Reviving a Dead Art
Pound sketches a poet out of step with his era who devotes himself to reviving a vanished poetic ideal. The speaker admires Flaubert as a model, stressing artistic stubbornness, classical allusions and isolation. The poem links aesthetic purity—an insistence on the sublime—with marginality and cultural irrelevance, portraying the artist’s failure to gain contemporaneous recognition despite sincere devotion to older standards of art.
Read Complete AnalysesFor three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime" In the old scene.Wrong from the start-- No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half-savage country, out of date; Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; Capaneus; trout for factitious bait; Caught in the unstopped ear; Giving the rocks small lee-way The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year. His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles; Observed the elegance of Circe's hair Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials. Unaffected by "the march of events," He passed from men's memory in l'an trentuniesme De son eage; the case presents No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.
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