The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on May 4, 2009
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgp037
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
Ezra Pound's Esteem for Edmund Waller: A New Source for Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
University of Nottingham
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Abstract |
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Ezra Pound's enigmatic pastiche of Edmund Waller's ‘Go, Lovely Rose’ in ‘Envoi’ has baffled and divided critics of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. This article returns to the text of the Ovid Press first edition of Mauberley (1920) to uncover a new source for the poem, Edmund Gosse's From Shakespeare to Pope: An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry in England (1885). It contests Hugh Witemeyer's influential reading of ‘Envoi’, in which he proposes that Pound held Waller to be a poet of ‘very little innate talent’, and instead presents evidence of Pound's esteem for Waller as a key innovator in English poetry. In From Shakespeare to Pope Gosse makes a parallel case for Waller's seminal importance, arguing that Waller single-handedly inaugurated the classical revival of the seventeenth century. It is proposed that Gosse's work on Waller influenced Pound and provided a framework for Pound's own attempted classical revival in Mauberley. The colophon to the Ovid Press first edition of Mauberley is shown to bear the legacy of this influence, giving Waller a new prominence in the poem as a model for Pound's own ambition to ‘resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry’.