Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 259“Gerontion,” is a free-verse dramatic monologue which stands in the line of
“Prufrock” and as a prelude to The Waste Land.^16
Ezra Pound called “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts” both
“a farewell to London” and “a study in form, an attempt to condense the
Jamesian novel.”^17 It is the poem that marks the end of Pound’s London days
as well as the close of his early work. Thereafter he would become the poet
of his evolving Modernist epic, The Cantos.One of the central themes of
“Mauberley” is the overriding tyranny of modern life, the relentless pressure
it exerts upon the individual. Mauberley’s limited Paterian aesthetic can’t
satisfy the demands of the age, and the poem ends with his isolation and
death. Thus the poem becomes an elegy not only for the character of
Mauberley but also for the heritage of aestheticism. By 1920 Pound had
already published a version of the first three cantos and had begun to work
toward A Draft of XVI Cantos(1925). One of the ways he turned away from
aestheticism was by embarking on an epic poem that would tell “the tale of
the tribe.” In formal terms, the chiseled quatrains of “Mauberley” derive
from Pound’s reading of Gautier as well as of Bion’s Adonis,though the
material is grafted together and presented through a series of abrupt cuts and
shifts that give the feeling of a Modernist collage. Many of its formal
devices—especially the way it radically changes ground, shifting perspective,
juxtaposing fragments and languages, mixing classical allusions and
contemporary events—also anticipate the method of The Waste Land.
The most important poem of our century (and also the most explicated
one) began, in T.S. Eliot’s own words, as “the relief of a personal ... grouse
against life.”^18 Eliot had been collecting fragments and planning a long
poem for years, but he finally managed to draft most of the poem which
would eventually become The Waste Land in 1921 in a sanitorium at
Lausanne where he was taking a rest cure. On one level, the poem
recapitulates his tormented personal life over the previous ten years—his
full-scale depression, his disastrous marriage to a woman both sickly and
high-strung (“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me,” her stand-
in says in the final poem), his sense of being enslaved to a job at Lloyds Bank,
his own fear of psychosis, hypersensitivity to noise, indecisiveness, and
suffering from “nerves.” The poem arises out of what he once called “some
rude unknown psychic materials.”^19 In a psychoanalytic sense, the poem—
which one of his friends called “Tom’s Autobiography”—represents the
psychic disintegration and reconstitution of a self.^20 The writing itself
became “these fragments I have shored against my ruin,” a psychic as well as
a religious journey from sin to revelation. At the same time, as Eliot
acknowledged many years later in a piece about Virgil, “A poet may believe