Abstract
In his farewell poem to London of 1920, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, Ezra Pound sketched an extraordinary portrait of a turn-of-the-century poet. Through a pastiche of Jamesian prose, he effects an almost Cubist dissipation of essence:
Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession,
Irresponse to human aggression,
Amid the precipitation, down-float
Of insubstantial manna,
Lifting the faint susurrus
Of his subjective hosannah.2
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Notes
See ‘A Coat’, W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1967 ), p. 142.
All quotations from Henry James, The Ambassadors (Signet, 1960).
See William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 ( New York: Dover Publications, 1953 ).
All quotations from D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (Penguin, 1967 ).
All quotations from Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (Penguin, 1982).
See T. E. Hulme, Speculations, edited by Herbert Read (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 48 and pp. 217–45.
‘Heart of Darkness: A Choice of Nightmares’, in C. B. Cox, Joseph Conrad The Modern Imagination: (Dent, 1974).
See, for instance, Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (Verso, 1980), pp. 134–7.
See Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, edited by Jeanne Schulkind (Granada, 1982), p. 90.
T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (Faber and Faber, 1964).
See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (Methuen, 1977), pp. 364ff.
See F. H. Bradley, ‘On Immediate Experience’, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford University Press, 1968). Eliot frequently refers to this concept in Knowledge and Experience, and, I believe, seeks to express it in many of his poems.
The conclusion to which I am brought is that a relational way of thought - any one that moves by the machinery of terms and relations - must give appearance, and not truth, F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford University Press, 1969 ), p. 28.
‘The facts in logical space are the world’, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961 ), 1. 13, p. 7.
See especially Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by G. C. Spivak (Johns Hopkins, 1976) and Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
All quotations from James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin, 1976).
See the discussion on the novel’s textuality in Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (Macmillan, 1979).
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© 1989 Dennis Brown
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Brown, D. (1989). Dissolving Self. In: The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19913-6_2
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