Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Ode is one of the masterpieces of 20th century English/American verse. Everything in the poem is difficult and elusive. The subtitle in French shows it is a kind of funeral homage to Pound himself, who features in the poem partly as Mauberley, a gentle disciple of the 1890’s who has to confront the realities of the literature business in London.
Gentle reader, please bear with me. I want to make one simple point, but making it requires a longish introduction.
This decidedly Medievalizing poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti s probably the best-known example of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. The P-R Brotherhood was a group of painters who challenged the Royal Academy by insisting on natural light, painting from nature, and meticulous care. They quite rightly deplored the excessive sentimentality and melodrama that had dominated painting since the early days of the Italian Manerists.
Language in the Republic of Letters and gibberish in the Empire of Propaganda
I’ve been reading in anthologies of Victorian verse in preparation for the summer symposium. I’d like to share a couple of poems I particularly like, both satires, progenitors of satiric currents that flow throughout twentieth-century commentary, high and low, to our own times. Both I found in Victorian Verse (1969), edited by George Macbeth.
Ray Olson
Aldous Huxley, it may be remembered, was not only George Orwell’s senior, but, as it happens, one of his masters at Eton in 1917, teaching the young lad French…
After completing, sort of, the three levels of Living Language Italian, I am happy to continue with a little further study. There are several lines that might be pursued:
First, a French manifesto of the Parnassien school that preached art for art’s sake, and then a few English poems by Andrew Lang that give some small idea of the French style.
Here is my take. Crimes should be about a human being harming another human being against the latter’s will (this includes property crimes).
