[We] need to know about the curious vocabulary used in the "Mauberley 1920" half of [Hugh Selwyn Mauberley] and, crucially, the problem of Mauberley's temperament remains an urgent issue in the reading experience. Professor [John J.] Espey established the formula [in his Ezra Pound's 'Mauberley'; a Study in Composition] for that temperament which, in one way or another, has characterised all subsequent commentaries: "… the relation is, I think, clear enough: the passive aesthete played off against the active instigator".
Such a formula seriously distorts the operation of the poem. One cannot deny that Mauberley is a minor artist, that it is right to see him quite firmly as a composite figure partaking of the whole range of aesthetic activities of a secondary nature prevalent during a particular period in English literary history. But is seems to me that the point of the poem is not simply to construct a debate about various kinds of creative behaviour: we can leave that within the sphere of "Imaginary Conversations". To play off one kind of imagination against another is not only too easy but to evade what was, for Pound, the actual situation of the artist, a situation to which he consistently responded in crisis terms. To recognise this situation, we have to get away from the idea of Mauberley as a passive "toy of circumstance", as the delicate diluter of what is potentially an aesthetic programme of some strength. He has to be seen as a more positive force who is painfully aware of his own crisis.
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