Mauberley 69Mauberley as essentially a popularization of Propertius; though the context indicates
Pound’s awareness that this is not the whole story.
- A line of Ronsard, connected by Pound with the Epitaphe of Corbière, to whose
procedures Mauberley is related as early Eliot is related to Laforgue. At the time when
Mauberley was written, Eliot was getting rid of Laforgue and in collaboration with Pound
assimilating Corbière and Gautier. The Corbière reverberations are functional in Pound’s
poem, relating it to still more complex modes of self-knowledge than we have opportunity
to go into here. At its deepest levels the poem is still virtually unread. - It should be noted that the Pisan Cantos derive their extraordinary vitality from the
fact that an apathein, among memorably-rendered ‘selected perceptions’ is not being
crudely opposed, in H.S. Mauberley’s fashion, to the ‘current exacerbations’ of the prison-
camp. The moon-nymph, the lynxes, the Chinese sages, the healing rain, unite with the
gun-roosts and the dialogue of murderers to form new-perceptive wholes. Pound’s ‘armor
against utter consternation’ is not gotten ‘by constant elimination’ but by vigorous fusion.
The Pisan Cantos comment on Mauberley in a way Pound furthered by incorporating
plangent scraps of the earlier poem into Canto LXXIV. - Cf. ‘as the young horse whinnies against the tubas’ (Canto LXXIX) and the
comments in chapter 28 below.