172
THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
Pound's use of Propertius in this section of the Homage illustrates what I have
suggested is typical of his adaptation of the myth of Hades. Beginning with a line
in which Propertius imagines his own death, Pound then moves on to a passage
from another poem in which the shades of Hades exist denuded of personality and
thus without conflict. His voice then emerging from the realm of the dead, he
abruptly turns to contemporary (Roman and by implication his own society's) political and military affairs, expresses his contempt, and returns to Hades, in which he
foresees his own immortality. Even this hope is qualified, the emotion muted by the
atmosphere of the underworld:
In vain, you call back the shade,
In vain, Cynthia. Vain call to unanswering shadow,
Small talk comes from small bones.
Pound's Homage does not reflect either Propertius' intense joy in love or his
terror of death; love in the Homage is a game, death more a symbol of the muted
spirit than real extinction. Even Propertius' traditional assertion that his poetry will
be immortal is qualified by Pound's irony. The persona of Propertius served Pound
as a means by which he could express his conception of the artist alienated from the
values of a society he despised, and, more important, it served as an "antiseptic,"
purifying the poet's feelings so that they emerge as the impersonal expression of
one of his "elaborate masks." Certainly the persona of Propertius helps to control
Pound's anger in the Homage, where it is a mere suggestion of the fury and contempt of his later work.
In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Pound employs a less congenial mask. Having arranged for his own burial to "get rid of all his troublesome energies," he allows
himself to speak through the desiccated form of Mauberley, a disillusioned minor
artist defeated by the insensitivity of his age. In a letter to Felix Schelling, Pound
says: "(Of course, I'm no more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock. Mais passons.)
Mauberley is a mere surface. Again a study in form, an attempt to condense the
James novel." One of the main critical controversies in regard to Mauberley has
concerned the question of the speaker or speakers of the separate poems. The most
convincing position is that of Thomas Connolly, who argues "that Mauberley is the
speaker of the first thirteen poems and that, except for the direct quotation in Poem
IV of the 'Mauberley' section, the entire series of poems in the second section is in
the third person and represents the dismissal of Mauberley by the hostile world of
letters." Pound is never directly present in the poem; he emerges, after his symbolic
or emotional death, in the aloofness, rage, and contempt of his persona, "mere surface" reactions to the very real problems Hugh Selwyn Mauberley touches on.
The first poem "E.P. Ode Pour l'Election de Son Sepulchre" sets the mood of the
whole series. This is a curious epitaph; while it describes an ineffectual poet,
"wrong from the start," who "passed from men's memory in l'an trentiesme," it
also identifies the dead poet as a heroic figure, a Capaneus and, even more important, an Odysseus. Capaneus, one of the Seven against Thebes, declared in his pride
that not even Zeus could stop him, and was killed by the god's thunderbolt on the
walls of the city. He is thus a hero destroyed by the intensity of his desires, which
