T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” was written
between 1910 and 1911, while Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” was written
afterwards in 1920. Ezra Pound actually helped Eliot’s poem get published after
he saw Eliot’s ability in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse,
marking the first time that Eliot had been published. Although Pound’s career
had been going on for about 10 years at the time that Mauberley was published,
Pound’s poem is considered a turning point in his career.
The first section
of Mauberly is concerned with a poet who finds his life to have lost
significance and is considered to be autobiographical. The poem seems to
express Pound’s shock at the horrors of World War I and has themes of despair
and materialism. Through the third person, Pound criticizes his past works as
having the sole goal of gaining fame and recognition, but then shifts the focus
to his defense. Eliot’s poem is written in the first person, and uses the
character of Prufrock, which Pound likely thought of when titling his poem with
a similar name. Prufrock is also characteristic of stream of consciousness, and
presents themes of frustration, embarrassment, and decay.
Eliot’s “Prufrock”
and Pound’s “Mauberley” are similar in that they are both representative of
modernist poetry. Together, Eliot and Pound were two significant figures in the
advancement of the modernist movement, and they both lived in England
around the early 1900s and 1920s. Eliot’s poem begins with an excerpt from
Dante’s “Inferno,” written in Latin, which, when translated, has the message of
not being fearful of embarrassment. Pound’s “Mauberley” also uses samples from
other languages, including a line from the song of Homer’s Sirens in
Greek and a quoted epigraph in French signed at the bottom by Caid Ali, which
might be a persona that Pound, or Mauberley, is using. In the first part of
Mauberley Pound describes his outrage at World War I – “There died a myriad/And
of the best, among them,/For an old bitch gone in the teeth,/For a botched civilization.”
“Prufrock” has a similar sense of despair and negativity in the first stanza
“restless nights in one-night cheap hotels /And sawdust restaurants with
oyster-shells…Of insidious intent,” showing the dreariness of Prufrock’s
surroundings. Later in the poem, Prufrock seems to be debating internally about
talking to a woman – “And indeed there will be time /To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’
and, ‘Do I dare?’” and worrying about the possible embarrassment.
The second part of
“Mauberley” begins in the third person and describes what Mauberley is thinking
through clever analogy – “Unable in the supervening blankness/To sift TO
AGATHON from the chaff/Until he found his seive.../ Ultimately, his
seismograph.” Although both Ezra Pound’s poem and T.S. Eliot’s poem have been
found to have some sort of message, this message is nearly impossible to
discern by just a close reading. Because Eliot uses stream of consciousness, it
is difficult to determine if something is meant to be interpreted literally or
symbolically. It might be said that these poems, similar in their style and the
eclectic nature of their stanzas, should be read as if all of the descriptions
are unconnected symbols, which together could be interpreted to produce some
sort of feeling – decay or angst – that might then be felt by the character –
J. Alfred Prufrock and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
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