Modern American Poetry

(^56) Hugh Kenner
echoes Pound’s. But Joyce refrains from unambiguous sympathy with
Stephen’s desire for Shelleyan sunward flight; he involves Stephen in an
Icarian fall into the sea of matter just as Pound reduces Mauberley to
Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession,
Irresponse to human aggression,
Amid the precipitation, down-float
Of insubstantial manna,
Lifting the faint susurrus
Of his subjective hosannah.
This cannot be taken as an account of the poet of the Cantosany more than
Stephen’s fastidious shrinking away from common noises can be regarded as
characteristic of the author of Ulysses.Both men channelled their disgust into
patient sifting of immense sottisiers; Pound has been, significantly, almost
alone in perceiving the continuity between Ulyssesand Bouvard et Pécuchet.In
UlyssesStephen is the focus of spectacular technical sonorities, sympathized
with and rejected; the same is true of the Lotus-eaters in the Cantos.
It may be remarked that the critic who thinks of Mauberleyas Pound’s
one successful poem commonly sees Stephen Dedalus as the hero of Ulysses,
perceives in both figures elements of failure, and takes as dim a view of Joyce
as of the author of the Cantos.
Against what may be mistaken for the drift of the above paragraphs, it
should be insisted that the process of creating and disowning Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley had not the personal importance for Pound that the purgation of
the Dedalian aspects of himself had for Joyce. No such trauma was involved
in the Idaho poet’s flight from America as in the Irish novelist’s
disentanglement from Church and Motherland. It is not true, on the other
hand, to say that Joyce could do nothing until he had focused and gotten rid
of Stephen: the bulk of Dublinerswas written in 1904, in Joyce’s twenty-third
year. But even when we have balanced Dublinerswith the social observations
in Lustra, and Chamber Music with the first volume of Personae, the
excernment of Stephen Dedalus remains of crucial importance to Joyce’s
future achievement in a way that the writing of Mauberleyprobably was not
to Pound. It was probably necessary that he focus in some such oblique way
the tension between popular demands and his earlier poetic activities before
embarking on the Cantos; but the process need not be thought to have
coincided with a spiritual crisis from which, as it suits the critic, he emerged
either crippled or annealed.
Mauberleydoes not mark in that way a hurt awakening from aesthetic