The Cultural Conflict of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
By imitating writing styles of ancient poets, Ezra Pound exhibited his attitude toward modern civilization, and his famous poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, is the stereotype. In this poem, Pound revealed his disagreement with industrial society. The poem is an imitation of other old poetic styles, or epic style; however, it presents ironic meaning. To fully understand Pound's divergence from modern culture, the ways of presenting his position will be firstly explained. Next, the focus is on the contrast between the elitist and popular culture. Finally, to highlight Pound's attitude, I prefer to make comparison with other literary masterpieces, Odyssey, which have similar poetic style, or theme, but share different sense.
In "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", the poem itself is a mosaic, which is a composition of many images, and these images are derived from words. Generally, in any forms of literary work, authors compose texts with words, then texts shape images; however, with proper selection and arrangement of words, which is known as diction, sometimes words form images directly. In this poem, Pound chose classical-sense words, such as sublime, Penelope, kinema, Dionysus, Ariel and so on, to create ancient images in this poem. After those images combine together as a mosaic, which is the poem, the mosaic appears an ancient but ironic sense; whereas, it reminds readers of "the glorious past," which indicates Pound's dissatisfaction about modern society. It is his bitter manner that forced him to escape from terrible reality by writing the poem. One way to run away from the disillusion is to create an imaginary world to replace it. In addition, his ironic manner ...
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