Modern American Poetry

Mauberley 55

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it ...

East Coker, V.

It may briefly be said that there has been a muddle about ‘impersonality’.
Mr. Eliot’s impersonality is Augustinian; a dispassionate contemplation of the
self which permits without romantic impurities a poetic corpus of
metamorphosed personae. Pound’s impersonality is Flaubertian: an effacement
of the personal accidents of the perceiving medium in the interests of accurate
registration of mœurs contemporaines.As we have said, the adoption of various
personae is for such an artist merely a means to ultimate depersonalization,
ancillary and not substantial to his major work. J. Alfred Prufrock is not Mr.
Eliot, but he speaks with Mr. Eliot’s voice and bears intricate analogical
relations with the later Eliot persona who is the speaker of Four Quartets.Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley, on the other hand, does not speak with Mr. Pound’s voice,
and is more antithetically than intimately related to the poet of the Cantos.It
would be misleading to say that he is a portion of Mr. Pound’s self whom Mr.
Pound is externalizing in order to get rid of him (like Stephen Dedalus); it
would be a more accurate exaggeration to say that he is a parody of Pound the
poet with whom Mr. Pound is anxious not to be confounded.
The sort of critic we have been mentioning, the one who finds the note
of sincerity in Mauberleyas nowhere else in Pound, pays unconscious tribute to
the accuracy with which Pound, in quest of devices for articulating this quasi-
Prufrockian figure, has echoed the intonations and gestures of a characteristic
Eliot poem.^1 Such a critic has been known to quote in confirmation of his view
of Pound Mr. Eliot’s remark, ‘I am sure of Mauberley,whatever else I am sure
of.’ Mr. Eliot has not, however, the perceptive limitations of his disciples; in the
same essay he insists that the entire Personaecollection is to be read as a process
of exploration leading up to the Cantos,‘which are wholly himself.’
It may be helpful to remark that Joyce is in this respect like Pound, an
artist of the Flaubertian kind; his Stephen Dedalus is a parody of himself, not
an artist but an aesthete, at length mercilessly ridiculed in Finnegans Wake.
The analogy is reasonably exact; Stephen is partly an aspect of Joyce himself
which Joyce is trying to purify; his horror of bourgeois civilization echoes
Joyce’s much as Mauberley’s‘sense of graduations’,

Quite out of place amid

Resistance of current exacerbations,