Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Art and Culture Quotes

In this early line, Pound compares Mauberley to Homer's Odysseus searching for home. But instead of having a loyal wife wait for him, Pound says that Mauberley's true companion was the French novelist Flaubert, whose work Pound holds up as a shining example of great literature.

Pound's making a dig at his home country, the good ol' U.S. of A., and says that compared to the civilizations of classical Europe, America is "half savage." Pound wasn't a fan of how money-driven American culture was, and he felt that America's art tended to suffer as a consequence of its obsession with moolah.

When Mauberley was trying to bring poetry back to relevance, he was looking for something beautiful. But it turns out that modern art is looking for something ugly to reflect the ugliness of the modern world. Too bad for Huey.

So a bunch of young Englishmen went off to World War I so they could defend their great country. The only problem is that they weren't fighting for such a great nation. According to Pound, they were fighting for a "botched civilization," since Pound believed that Britain was getting barbaric and stupid in modern times. It's no surprised that he pulled up stakes and moved out of England shortly after writing this poem.

The painting of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid is really beautiful to Pound. But he's pretty disappointed that nearly a hundred years have gone by, and London's Tate gallery still can't find something beautiful from more recent times. It's not totally clear if this is a problem with the gallery's selection policies, or modern art. But it's probably both.

This is definitely one of the more bitter things you'll see from Pound in this poem. Here, he's basically saying that most modern folks think art is totally subjective, and that no one knows what's good or not at first sight. People only decide what's good after a large group of people have gotten together and decided.