Modern American Poetry

Mauberley 59

Unaffected by ‘the march of events’,

He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentiesme

De son eage;the case presents

No adjunct to the Muse’s diadem.

The echo of Villon is of course the crowning irony. Hispassage from the
memory of his contemporaries has if anything augmented his place in the
history of poetry.
As soon as we see that this epitaph is not (except at the level at which
it transposes Corbière) being written by Pound, the entire sequence falls into
focus. The eleven succeeding poems (II–XII) present an ideogrammic survey
of the cultural state of post-war England: of the culture which we have just
heard pronouncing upon the futility of Pound’s effort to ‘resuscitate the dead
art of poetry’. The artist who was ‘unaffected by the march of events’ offers
his version of this criterion:

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace;

the third poem, with its audacious closing counterpoint from Pindar’s Second
Olympic(of which there is a readily accessible translation in the Biographia
Literaria,ch. xviii), generalizes with a more austere bitterness:

All things are a flowing,

Sage Heracleitus says;

But a tawdry cheapness

Shall outlast our days.

Poems IV and V are similarly paired. IV surveys with compassion the moral
dilemmas of the war:

These fought in any case,

and some believing,

pro domo, in any case ...

poises sacrifice against domestic cheapness:

walked eye-deep in hell

believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving

came home, home to a lie,