Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was published by The Ovid Press in a limited edition of approximately 200 copies in June 1920, and is Pound’s most formally perfect long poem — the work that sums up his first London decade (1908-1920) and announces his departure for Paris. It is a sequence of eighteen short poems in which Pound creates a fictional poet, Mauberley, whose failure to achieve major art in a philistine culture mirrors and distorts Pound’s own experience.
The Poem
The sequence divides into two parts:
Part One: “E.P. Ode pour l’election de son sepulchre” — a semi-autobiographical portrait of a poet (“E.P.”) who arrived in London determined to “resuscitate the dead art of poetry” and found instead a culture that preferred “the pianola” to Sappho. The section includes devastating portraits of London literary life: the salon hostesses, the reviewers, the publishers who “wanted a survey of the marketplace.” It also includes the war poems — “There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them” — among the most compact expressions of disillusionment in English.
Part Two: “Mauberley 1920” — the portrait of Mauberley himself, a minor aesthete who retreats from reality into pure form and dies in artistic sterility. Mauberley is what Pound feared becoming: a craftsman without subject, a formalist without content, a poet who made “no adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.”
The relationship between E.P. and Mauberley is the poem’s central complexity. They are not the same person: E.P. is robust, angry, engaged with the world; Mauberley is delicate, passive, retreating. But they share a predicament: both exist in a culture that has no use for poetry. The difference is response: E.P. leaves (as Pound left London for Paris); Mauberley stays and fades.
The poem’s versification is extraordinary — Pound draws on Gautier, Laforgue, Propertius, and the English Nineties poets, shifting meter and diction from section to section. The quatrains of the opening (“These fought in any case, / and some believing, / pro domo, in any case…”) have the snap of epigram; the Mauberley sections are more languorous, mimicking the aesthetic decadence they describe.
Significance
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is widely considered the finest English poem between Eliot’s “Prufrock” (1915) and The Waste Land (1922). It achieves what the Imagist lyrics could not: sustained argument, social commentary, and autobiographical depth within a formal structure. It is also the bridge to The Cantos: having exhausted what the shorter forms could do, Pound needed a larger architecture.
Collecting Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
First edition (The Ovid Press, London, 1920): Boards with printed label on spine. Limited to approximately 200 copies (15 signed on Japan vellum, 20 signed on handmade paper, the remainder unsigned on handmade paper).
Identification points:
- The Ovid Press imprint
- John Rodker, publisher
- Limited edition stated
- Approximately 30 pages
Market values:
- Japan vellum copies (signed): $15,000–$30,000
- Handmade paper signed: $8,000–$15,000
- Unsigned copies: $3,000–$8,000
This is one of the great prizes of twentieth-century poetry collecting — a major poem in a tiny first edition, published by a private press that produced beautiful books in minuscule quantities. Every serious collection of modern poetry wants a copy.
First trade appearance in Poems 1918-21 (Boni & Liveright, 1921): The first widely available text. $200–$500 in jacket.