Fishing for Disillusionment (PDF)

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. [...]