Modern American Poetry

(^64) Hugh Kenner
Jamesian hero who might have been Pound. Part two is practically a précis
of the flirtation with passionate illusion of Lambert Strether in The
Ambassadors.‘Of course I moved among miracles,’ said Strether. ‘It was all
phantasmagoric.’ The third part contains the essential action; having
postulated Mauberley’s ‘fundamental passion’:
This urge to convey the relation
Of eye-lid and cheek-bone
By verbal manifestations;
To present the series
Of curious heads in medallion,
and implied a context of opportunities missed—
Which anaesthesis, noted a year late,
And weighed, revealed his great affect,
(Orchid), mandate
Of Eros, a retrospect.
—Pound particularizes on the Propertian conflict between the aesthetic
martyr and the demands of the age.
Contemplation is weighed against Shavian strenuousness:
The glow of porcelain
Brought no reforming sense
To his perception
Of the social inconsequence.
Thus if her colour
Came against his gaze,
Tempered as if
It were through a perfect glaze
He made no immediate application
Of this to relation of the state
To the individual, the month was more temperate
Because this beauty had been.
In Canto XIII Confucius provides a cross-light: