The Elusive Allusion: Poetry and Exegesis

Abstract

Monday morning, and this week’s seminar is on Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Reponses from the students are punctual and familiar. ‘It’s impossible to understand!’ ‘Why so many references to things we’ve never heard of?’ ‘If that’s what he means, why doesn’t he say so?’ ‘It’s elitist.’ ‘He was a fascist, apparently.’ So the annual litany proceeds. Perhaps a broader framing of the problem will help. But: ‘How can it be witty if I don’t know what he’s talking about?’ ‘We don’t do the classics anymore! And I can’t even pronounce these words you say are in Greek!’ ‘All these writers’ — Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson and co. — ‘are dead and buried; who reads them?’ And the larger question of who and what Mauberley himself might represent in the poem? We never actually get to that, partly because after the work of exegesis has consumed two generally irritable and resentful hours we have managed to construe only the first four pages of the poem. Perhaps the best concluding strategy here is to confront the problem head on: our culture has become increasingly remote from what Pound simply assumed were the principal reference points for any thinking person — Homer, Sappho, Horace … The list is long but Pound’s network of allusions rarely outstripped a good middle-class education at the time his poem was written. And it is, after all, precisely the familiarity of the classics and the ideological work they have done in the recent past (‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria morI’) that are the principal targets of the poem’s ire.