Modernism’s Medieval Imperative: The Hard Lessons of Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

1. Making It Medieval

Ezra Pound, modernism’s greatest impresario, was also a frustrated medievalist. Accepted into the University of Pennsylvania at the age of fifteen on the strength of his facility in Latin, he transferred to Hamilton College after poor grades in his sophomore year. There he cultivated an interest in Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages, especially Provençal. He also developed a serious interest in Dante: by the age of twenty he had already decided to write a modern epic modeled on the Commedia. After graduating from Hamilton, he returned to Penn to do graduate work in medieval Romance topics. Although he dropped out without starting his doctorate, when he arrived in London in 1909 he got a job lecturing on medieval literature at the Regent Street Polytechnic. These lectures became the basis for his first critical book, The Spirit of Romance, published in 1910. His early poetry abounds in medieval themes, parodies, translations, and recreations. In 1920, even after he had firmly established himself internationally as a leading modernist poet and thinker, he still sought the long-delayed doctorate. Unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania refused his request to receive the degree based on his published work. After 1920, Pound devoted himself to The Cantos, the long-projected engagement with Dante. It would provide the main focus of his poetic endeavors for the next five decades until his death in 1972.

Pound’s medievalist fascinations are easy to underestimate. One can take them as one more of his many idiosyncracies: as a primitivism allied to his reactionary politics, or even, his aesthetic vanguardism notwithstanding, as a slightly belated instance of the general American ambivalence about modernity that T. J. Jackson Lears documents so well in his classic study No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981).¹ There is no disputing Pound’s primitivism. But primitivism constituted an important strand in much high modernist work, regardless of its politics, and Pound’s politics, in spite of their eventual turn to fascism, emerged out of a complex set of determinants. These include the guild socialism of A. R. Orage, the editor of The New Age, “the most important socialist magazine in Edwardian and Georgian England.” Guild socialism sought inspiration in the example of medieval guilds. As Lee Garver has recently pointed out, The Seafarer first appeared in The New Age, and its publication coincided with a seaman’s strike which the journal and Pound himself supported. And that is only one example. Any attempt to treat what seems nostalgic or regressive in Pound’s medievalism must first contend with Pound’s own definition of the issue. For he consistently presents his medievalism as inseparable from his vanguardism. To make it new was quite often to make it medieval.²

This essay proposes to take up this imperative on the terms in which Pound himself offered it: that is, as implicating modernism as a whole, rather than simply expressing his own interests. Pound’s centrality to modernism continues to be a source of intense scholarly debate. A self-described “totalitarian modernist,” Pound, either in his politics or his own pretensions, has not much helped his cause in recent decades. Nevertheless, on the present point, his pretensions to centrality are more difficult to question. Pound founded his medievalism on the recognition of one of modernism’s central paradoxes. Modernism’s vanguardism, its definition of its place in history by the completeness of its break with the past, actually ensures that the past can never be forgotten. The desire for a radically new, radically original departure is just that: a desire. Like many desires, it is logically incoherent and it certainly can never be completely fulfilled. The desire’s incoherence will always privilege the question of what will be retained as much as that of what will be discarded. The debate about Pound’s general importance is by and large a debate about the legitimacy of his claim to true vanguardist status.³ Does his work in fact constitute some radical new departure? Or does it...