[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...