Modern American Poetry

(^66) Hugh Kenner
Left him delighted with the imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge,
and we are warned by inverted commas in the next stanza against adopting
too readily the standpoint of pontifical criticism:
Incapable of the least utterance or composition,
Emendation, conservation of the ‘better tradition’,
Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,
August attraction or concentration.
That ‘better tradition’ interjects the accent of a Buchanan or an Edmund
Gosse; the other canons are Flaubertian. Mauberley is not simply a failure by
Mr. Nixon’s standards of success, he is a failure tout court;he is the man to
whom that initial epitaph might with justice be applied; the man for whom
the writer of the epitaph has mistaken ‘E.P.’ It is the focusing of this that
guarantees the closing irony:
Ultimate affronts to
Human redundancies;
Non-esteem of self-styled ‘his betters’
Leading, as he well knew,
To his final
Exclusion from the world of letters.
The irrelevancy of the canons of ‘the world of letters’, for once right but
from utterly wrong reasons, very efficient in guillotining the already defunct,
could not be more subtly indicated.
As a technical marvel this poem cannot be too highly praised. Only
Pound’s economical means were sufficiently delicate for the discriminations
he sought to effect: ‘perhaps’ and ‘we admit’ belong to one mode of
perception, ‘the month was more temperate because this beauty had been’ to
another, the concessive ‘certainly’ and the clinical ‘incapable’ and ‘in brief’ to
a third. The technique of distinguishing motivations and qualities of insight
solely by scrupulous groupings of notes on the connotative or etymological
keyboard has never been brought to greater refinement. One cannot think of
another poet who could have brought it off.
The sequence is re-focused by a vignette of hedonistic drift protracting
the coral island imagery that had troubled Mauberley’s reverie, ending with