Oh Hugh, How You Make my Heart Swoon

Frankly, the title has nothing to do with the idea of this blog post. I just prefer the Hugh Selwyn Mauberly poem by Ezra Pound more than the Cantos. Because honestly, who wants to write about a load of inconsistent ideals? Definitely not a high school senior. So I went with Hugh. I really do not learn anything about this Hugh but the quantity of poetic devices is magnificent and correlates greatly with Ezra Pound's life. For example, allusions are given great emphasize on by Pound. In Hugh part I, Circe is mentioned. In case you did not know, Circe was a minor goddess of magic who murdered her husband and was placed on the island of Aeaea as punishment. So in part I of Hugh, the male character "observed the elegance of Circes' hair rather than the mottoes on sun-dials". This is relevant because it describes how the main character has a sick imagination. Circe is usually taken in a bad light by most of society and the fact that the character would rather gaze at her hair than sun-dials is important. The character obviously does not care what society thinks and sticks to his own way of dealing with life, therefore somehow loving a girl who looks like Circe. This parallels with Pound's life because let me tell you, he most definitely was an independent thinker compared to America/Europe. How many real acquaintances do you know that have been inducted into an insane asylum for the good part of a decade? Exactly. The character in Hugh needs to be sent to an insane asylum too. Another common aspect of Pound's writing was inserting random European language into his primarily English poems. Yet, the additions are not as random as they appear to be. In Part I of Hugh, the third line states "E.P. Ode pour l'election de son sepulchre" meaning "Ezra Pound: Ode for the Choice of his Sepulcher". This translation of the French language adds emphasize to the fact that the poem is written in third person and Pound describes his own hardships in the poem. Without this translation, the fact may have been casually overlooked by the reader and may have obtained the wrong idea about the purpose of this poem. Lastly, Pound usually always adds some type of parallelism to his poems. But for once, part 1 of Hugh does not. Instead it has the rare occurrence of an actual verse form. This is extremely abnormal for the typical Pound poem. The form is very simple: abab cdcd efef and so on. Personally, I think Pound put more effort into the structure of this poem compared to others because he was truly passionate about this particular hate rant toward America. He wanted to insert a more lyrical position of Hugh to maybe gain more readers or maybe add more emphasize on trying to traditional poems. Who knows? Either way, this poetic device may have contributed to the turning point in Pound's career, right before he ran away from England. Hugh definitely has much more biographical details about Pound's personal life which he transcends through his usual poetic devices of allusions, language translations, and typically parallelism but in this case, a real verse form. You go Glen Coco!