Fishing for Disillusionment

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, Deerfield Academy (Deerfield Academy), course: Cambridge Seminar, language: English, abstract: It has been asserted that Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is the seminal work which sees the poet through his greatest transformation.1 It was written and published in 1920 at a time when Pound was revising his views about the role of poetry and art. Though it shows ambiguity about the role of the speakers in the poem, it is generally accepted that E.P. and H. S. Mauberley are the two personae through which Pound speaks. These characters both reject the vision of the pre-war aesthete for a temperament that results in the transformation of Mr. Pound. Ezra Pound recognizes that art is shaped through a societal pressure defined by the demands of the day. He smartly dubs this pressure 'the age' as if to hint at the fickle and temporary nature of artistic tastes. The age seems to be demanding 'an image of its accelerated grimace'. For Pound, that roughly translates to the kind of culture that gives rise to Futurism: a blinded lauding of machines, noises, explosions in harmony with the buzzing of sprawling urban centers and the battery of howitzer guns. [...]