Pound’s “New Found Orchid”: The Poetics of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

by Maximilian S Werner

The epitaph beginning Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (E.P. Ode pour l'Election de Son Sepulchre) signifies Pound's attempt to create a viable, new poetic. One of the questions that arises as a result of the epitaph’s placement, and that it is an epitaph, is precisely what this new poetic or sensibility involves. That the poem as a whole actively juxtaposes distinct sections or content[1] suggests that Pound intends the figure of E.P., who is "dead" at the outset, to be compared or contrasted with the figure of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, particularly as he is rendered in the sequence beginning with Mauberley and ending with poem IV. Over the course of the sequence, Mauberley becomes increasingly estranged and eventually “dies" because of his limited poetics or relationship to the world.  And yet it is a result of these same "graduations" that the figure of E.P. (who also recognizes his past limitations) is resuscitated and the past is made relevant to the modern world.

Both figures embody an aspect of Pound's self, and it is by comparing their perspectives that the gist of Pound's new poetics is realized: an interdependency between past and present is crucial for the maintenance of a vital poetry, because together the past and present offer a sense of continuity, connectedness and, therefore, a larger and deeper significance. This connectedness is achieved through a simultaneous embrace and transcendence of one's own time, and by linking the essential as it is represented by both past and present. By seeing the past or present in isolation, the poet is certain to become a "consciousness disjunct," a fate that Pound seems to tacitly acknowledge when he writes,

For three years, out of key with his time,

He strove to resuscitate the dead art

Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"

In the old sense. Wrong from the start – (1-4)

And later,

Unaffected by "the march of events,"

He passed from men's memory in l'an trentuniesme

De son eage; the case presents 

No adjunct to the Muses' diadem. (17-20)

Even if E.P. is "out of key with his time, "he remains firmly rooted in the tradition by "maintaining the sublime / In the old sense." And yet there is something regrettable and limiting about being unaffected by the events of one's time. Thus E.P.'s "case presents no adjunct to the Muses' diadem" because it does not involve, to borrow a phrase from Pound's ABC of Reading, "a complete presentation of life, or of [E.P.'s] epoch" (41). To an extent, Mauberley shares E.P.'s interest in the past, for "His true Penelope/Was Flaubert" as well, but like E.P., he seems to be missing something,

Firmness,

Not the full smile,

His art, but an art

In profile; (Mauberley 9-12)

Together with the opening stanza, which has Mauberley turn away "from the 'eau-forte / Par Jacquemart’ / To the strait head / Of Messalina," the two stanzas following this one suggest that Mauberley's relationship with and reference to the past is a problem for Pound. Unlike E.P., whose aim it was to retain and renew "the classics in paraphrase," Mauberley does not seem to have the power "To sift TO AGATHON from the chaff." The coin on which the "strait head / Of Messalina" is pressed becomes a powerful trope for Pound's aversion to both sensationalism and materialism, and yet it is this toward which Mauberley turns. This may explain why Pound likens him to a

Colourless

Pier Francesca, 

Pisanello lacking the skill 

To forge Achia. (13-16)

As elsewhere, Pound here uses juxtaposition to create tension and establish meaning. The comparison implies that there is something potentially redemptive about Mauberley, because even though the very "skills" that make Francesca's and Pisanello's work remarkable are negated, they are still Francesca and Pisanello. Or are they? In any case, Mauberley's contribution is not realized in isolation, but in proportion to how it helps clarify the need of "selected perceptions" (to jump ahead to The Age Demanded), as they derive from the past and present. In spite of E.P.'s being born "out of date," he avoids this disconnect between the past and present when, in stanza three of the epitaph, he writes,

Ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ’, ὂσ’ ἐνὶ Τρoίῃ

Caught in the unstopped ear; 

Giving the rocks small lee-way

The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year. (9-12)

In contrast to a "Colourless / Pier Francesca" and a "Pisanello lacking the skill / To forge Achia," the figure resuscitated here, Odysseus, retains its vitality by virtue of being linked and found relevant to the modern world. This moment in the epitaph counters "the faint susurrus / Of [Mauberley's] subjective hosannah," which Pound came to see as the "Ultimate affronts to/ Human redundancies" (The Age Demanded 49-50).  For by employing materials from various contexts, among them Greek quotations, jargon and their attendant tonalities, E.P. succeeds in objectifying the moment and thereby infuses it with a much vaster importance, an importance that includes but goes well beyond his own situation. Pound hints at this process when, in ABC of Reading, he notes that a word’s meaning “comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably” (36). He also states: “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension” (34). Although the sentence break "sing all forms and degrees of human comprehension" is fortuitous, it accurately describes what Pound is doing in the stanza above. The fact that he "sings" the epitaph (and indeed much of the entire poem) in quatrains with an ababcdcd rhyme scheme may seem antithetical to Pound’s goal of representing his time, that is, when read in terms of the final stanza of section II.  But if Pound has taught the reader anything, it is to observe how the materials are being used in relation to one another. Thus he writes,

The "age demanded"chiefly a mould in plaster, 

Made with no loss of time,

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster 

Or the "sculpture" of rhyme. (9-12)

Because Pound, here and throughout the epitaph, uses quatrains and the "sculpture" of rhyme, the reader may get the sense that he is still resisting the demands of his own time. It may seem, moreover, that the use of the rhyming quatrain is part of resuscitating "the dead art of poetry,” particularly when considering that the form is the most common of all European forms. But Pound has made statements elsewhere that suggest otherwise. In "A Few Dont's for an Imagist,” Pound offers guidelines for the Imagist, one of which is "to compose on the order of musical cadence and phrasing, not according to strict, unvarying rhythms." Also, late in ABC of Reading, Pounds states that "rhythm is a form cut into time" (202). 

Of course, Pound is again being ironic, for when the reader notes the variations of, in, and because of the line (changes in stressed and unstressed syllables, line lengths, sporadic caesura placement, heavy internal rhyme, assonance, consonance and consequent tonal shifts), he or she will realize that the true rhymed quatrains and the "mould in plaster" are essentially the same thing. What’s needed is not merely a "pianola," an artificial form or container that determines how a thing is expressed, but a form "vastly more compendious, [which] will naturally accommodate a vastly greater amount of real speech, than will a set of variants starting from a single type of line, whether measured by duration or by the alternating heaviness of syllables" (203). Thus, Pound uses different "types" of lines in the same way he uses different languages to create multiple surfaces or textures and thus get nearer to the "sum of human wisdom" or the "full smile."

When seen in isolation, neither E.P. nor Mauberley can be said to possess the art of the "full smile, […] but an art / In profile." And while the failure of each involves a lack of connection to the modern world, both E.P. and Mauberley represent two extreme "cases" of disassociation, and it is through "COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen [or poet] with another"(17) that the stages of Pound's poetics are further realized and clarified. Thus the first stage of Mauberley's divorce from the world is articulated in this way:

For three years, diabolus in the scale,

He drank ambrosia,

All passes, ANANGKE prevails, 

Came end, at last, to that Arcadia.

He had moved amid her phantasmagoria,

Amid her galaxies,

NUKTIS'AGALMA (Mauberley II, 1-7)

Readers should not be surprised if, upon reading the first line, they hear E.P. whispering from the grave, for the line is nearly the exact double of the first line of his epitaph, which reads, "For three years, out of key with his time," but with some important differences. Indeed, the lines contain the origins of both figures' failures, and what follows each is an articulation or, as the case may be, a consequence of those failures. Even though E.P. “strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry,” he did so at the expense of involving the present, of finding a poetry that was demonstrably relevant to the world in which he lived, the consequence of which being that "He passed from men's memory in l'antrentuniesme / De son eage."

E.P.'s obsession with the past and, therefore, his indulgence in it finds its match in Mauberley, who, as a way of dealing with his own "diabolus in the scale, / […] drank ambrosia, […] moved amid her phantasmagoria." So while E.P. discarded the things of his time for the past (perhaps as a reaction the "savage" half of the country), Mauberley's "devil,” his consuming "urge to convey the relation/ Of eye-lid and cheek bone/ By verbal manifestation," compelled him to abandon the sensual world of "wide-banded irides/And botticellian sprays implied/ In their diastasis" for "phantasmagoria" and "aerial flowers," a process that sets him drifting toward "the final estrangement." 

Again, the idea of an art in profile resurfaces, for both E.P. and Mauberley, because of their preoccupations and lack of the reference point the modern world has to offer, share a limited perspective, the perspective of a "consciousness disjunct." As noted above, Mauberley's disassociation with the world is a result of his inability to go beyond a merely "verbal manifestation" and align himself with the sensual world from which the manifestations derive. Thus, in the words of The Age Demanded,

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 relation of the state

To the individual, the month was more temperate 

Because this beauty had been. (15-16)

Mauberley is clearly guilty of art for its own sake, for he is incapable of moving beyond his own subjective perceptions and observing and using the relationship between them to arrive at a sense of continuity, not isolation. For Mauberley, art does not bring a "reforming sense / Of the social inconsequence"; on the contrary, the value of art exists, for Mauberley, in proportion to how much and readily it mollifies his individual existence or "current exacerbations." Consequently, his art and its effects are short-lived, but Mauberley would perhaps be consoled by reminding himself that "the month was more temperate / Because this beauty had been."

It is here, amid these "ambrosial circumstances," that the first stirrings of "An hedonist" are heard. The "current exacerbations" prove to be too much for Mauberley because he lacks "perceptivity," the power to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus he becomes absorbed in what is easiest, cheapest, nearest.  He wants "Something for the modern stage. . . Made with no loss of time," to be delighted with the imaginary / Audition of the phantasmal sea surge." But this ambrosial stupor leaves Mauberley

Incapable of the least utterance or composition, 

Emendation, conservation of the "better tradition," 

Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities, 

August attraction or concentration.

The reader must wonder how important it is to be affected by "'the march of events"' of his or her time if this is what happens as a result. But by putting the phrase (and a somewhat clichéd phrase at that) in quotation marks, Pound manages to mark it, to set it apart. This, taken together with Mauberley's inability to select not only from the "better tradition," but from his own time as well, suggests that Pound does not intend us to equate being "unaffected by ‘the march of events’” with being "out of key" with one's time. Indeed, it seems more likely that, if associating the "march of events" with the sensational, Pound wants a poetics that is selective, and separates the "better" and "insubstantial manna" from one's own time as well as from the "better tradition."

Both E.P. (who is absorbed in the past), and Mauberley (who drifts anesthetized "Amid aerial flowers), risk "Exclusion from the world of letters" and isolation by failing to relate their arts to the world in which they live, and yet each persona engenders a poetics that is essential to the other. By comparing them the reader learns that a connection to the "better tradition" is essential to a vital poetics, particularly when this relationship involves the world in which one lives. Through this relationship, a sense of continuity is created for the individual, and thus a hedge against his or her perceiving the world as nothing but an "overblotted / Series / of intermittencies." 

Mauberley engenders the need to resist "the chaff," to refine one's medium by selecting what's "better" from one's time, a process that requires a knowledge of the tradition, without which the poet or individual floats "amid aerial flowers" because s/he lacks a means of comparison. Therefore, in their extreme forms, both E.P.'s and Mauberley's approaches are, ultimately, equally deficient. Apart, the two figures are like "The still stone dogs, / Caught in metamorphosis," but when read in conjunction, and when the past represented by E.P. is resuscitated by the present as it is embodied in Mauberley, they help "to designate / [Pound's] new found orchid."

FOOTNOTES

[1] In ABC of Reading, Pound writes: “The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another” (17).