From “Accelerated Grimace” to Catastrophe: Ethics of Aesthetics in Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

The article proposes to read Ezra Pound’s long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley with a view to unravelling an ethic that informs the poem. It is demonstrated that the source of the English national intellectual stasis is located in the depreciation of arts and letters in the contemporary world but the consequences of this collapse of literature lead to a genocidal catastrophe, which is shown to also hover about section two of the poem, customarily read as a denunciation of apathy that was rife among Pound’s contemporary poets and artists. The notion of ethics is derived from Pound’s own writings of the period and one of his principal philosophical sources: Confucius.