53Firmness,
Not the full smile,
His art, but an art
In profile.With the partial exception of the Cathaysequence, the Personaevolume up to
page 183 may be said to be implicit in the Cantos.The early poems are
deficient in finality; they supplement and correct one another; they stand up
individually as renderings of moods, but not as manifestations of mature self-
knowledge; they try out poses. They are leading their author somewhere; the
reader may be excused if his interests are not wholly engaged, if he finds
himself separating the technique from the value of the presented state. This
may be said without unsaying anything in the preceding survey, the object of
which has been to suggest considerable profit in what may not appear of
compelling interest at first glance in 1951. Not only is the history of the
purification of our post-Victorian speech contained in those pages, but a
right perception of the kinds of achievement there contained will make the
Cantoseasier reading. And in isolating principles of apprehension it has been
an advantage to have relatively uncomplicated texts to explicate.
The volume ends, however, with two great self-justifying poems.
Homage to Sextus Propertius(1917) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley(1920) would,
HUGH KENNERMauberley
From The Poetry of Ezra Pound. © 1968 by New Directions Publishing Corp.