Ezra Pound

“ Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before, disillusions as never told in the old days, hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies. ”

“ II. "Qu'est ce qu'ils savent de l'amour, et gu'est ce qu'ils peuvent comprendre? S'ils ne comprennent pas la poèsie, s'ils ne sentent pas la musique, qu'est ce qu'ils peuvent comprendre de cette pas- sion en comparaison avec laquelle la rose est grossière et le parfum des violettes un tonnerre?" ”

“ M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.
BRENNBAUM.
THE sky-like limpid eyes,
The circular infant's face,
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace ”

“ Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.
For two hours he talked of Gallifet;
Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;
Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub. . .
But showed no trace of alcohol
At the autopsy, privately performed—
Tissue preserved—the pure mind
Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued
With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church. ”

“ A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
III.
HE tea-rose tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola "replaces"
Sappho's barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall reign throughout our days.
Even the Christian beauty
Defects after Samothrace;
"We see τὸ καλόν
Decreed in the market place.
Faun's flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint's vision.
We have the press for wafer ”

“ His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials. ”

“ Than the classics in paraphrase! ”

“ In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
No hardly, but, seeing he had been born ”

“ Left him delighted with the imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge,
Incapable of the least utterance or composition, ”

“ Transcriber's note: Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley contains accents, diphthongs and Greek characters. Facsimile images of the poems as originally published are freely available online from the Internet Archive. ”