Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Analysis

When it comes to the form and meter of this poem, Pound is very clever at walking a tightrope between the old and new. On the one hand, he's happy to use classical four-line stanzas, or quatrains,...

The speaker of this poem seems omniscient at times, since it travels across different times and places. But overall, the speaker is most likely Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, who is a sort of stand-in for...

The setting of this one is pretty much all over the place. In lines 61 to 93, we're watching young men die on a bloody field. But on lines 357 to 381, we're suddenly chilling out on a tropical isla...

The sound of this poem is pretty interesting. On the one hand, you have clusters of four lines with a straightforward rhyme. But on the other hand, the poem doesn't have any clear meter, and Pound...

Well for starters, if you try to tell someone what poem you've been reading, you'll always have to repeat yourself. No one ever understands the title of this poem the first time you say it out loud...

Allusions, allusions, and just for the fun of it, a dozen more allusions. There are times when Pound makes "The Waste Land" look like a walk in the park when it comes to classic art trivia. Worse y...

This is a toughie, no doubt about it. Some could even argue that this poem is tougher than Eliot's "The Waste Land." It uses just as many obscure references, but it's also longer by more than a hun...

Yeah, so it turns out that Pound was eventually tried for treason by the U.S. because he made anti-American radio broadcasts in support of Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy. Maybe dude shoul...

Pound might spend more than a few lines celebrating the god of wine and sex (Dionysus), but he never really mentions sex directly in the poem. If anything, he spends most of his time talking about...

The Fourth Ecologue of Nemesianus (epigraph)Capaneus (8)Homer's Odyssey (9-15, 248)Gustave Flaubert (8)Sappho (36)Greek god Dionysus (37)Shakespeare's The Tempest (40)Heraclitus (42)Apollo (57)Hora...