Editor-in-Chief
RSS Feeds
Authors
- Kerry Bolton
- Jonathan Bowden
- Buttercup Dew
- Collin Cleary
- Jef Costello
- F. Roger Devlin
- Julius Evola
- Gregory Hood
- Juleigh Howard-Hobson
- Greg Johnson
- Jason Jorjani
- Ward Kendall
- Anthony M. Ludovici
- Trevor Lynch
- H. L. Mencken
- J. A. Nicholl
- Andy Nowicki
- James J. O'Meara
- Michael O'Meara
- Christopher Pankhurst
- Tito Perdue
- Michael Polignano
- Spencer J. Quinn
- Savitri Devi
- Fenek Solère
- Irmin Vinson
- Leo Yankevich
- Francis Parker Yockey
Archives
- January 2021 (43)
- December 2020 (90)
- November 2020 (87)
- October 2020 (131)
- September 2020 (82)
- August 2020 (81)
- July 2020 (88)
- June 2020 (92)
- May 2020 (83)
- April 2020 (82)
- March 2020 (82)
- February 2020 (75)
- January 2020 (80)
- December 2019 (91)
- November 2019 (91)
- October 2019 (89)
- September 2019 (70)
- August 2019 (76)
- July 2019 (74)
- June 2019 (61)
- May 2019 (69)
- April 2019 (72)
- March 2019 (63)
- February 2019 (54)
- January 2019 (78)
- December 2018 (64)
- November 2018 (63)
- October 2018 (70)
- September 2018 (61)
- August 2018 (73)
- July 2018 (58)
- June 2018 (58)
- May 2018 (69)
- April 2018 (60)
- March 2018 (84)
- February 2018 (54)
- January 2018 (76)
- December 2017 (66)
- November 2017 (84)
- October 2017 (79)
- September 2017 (73)
- August 2017 (72)
- July 2017 (61)
- June 2017 (56)
- May 2017 (56)
- April 2017 (54)
- March 2017 (65)
- February 2017 (57)
- January 2017 (59)
- December 2016 (52)
- November 2016 (68)
- October 2016 (61)
- September 2016 (62)
- August 2016 (51)
- July 2016 (63)
- June 2016 (75)
- May 2016 (63)
- April 2016 (65)
- March 2016 (75)
- February 2016 (82)
- January 2016 (82)
- December 2015 (94)
- November 2015 (97)
- October 2015 (75)
- September 2015 (77)
- August 2015 (73)
- July 2015 (66)
- June 2015 (69)
- May 2015 (64)
- April 2015 (72)
- March 2015 (66)
- February 2015 (63)
- January 2015 (81)
- December 2014 (61)
- November 2014 (64)
- October 2014 (79)
- September 2014 (60)
- August 2014 (53)
- July 2014 (72)
- June 2014 (53)
- May 2014 (43)
- April 2014 (51)
- March 2014 (50)
- February 2014 (55)
- January 2014 (64)
- December 2013 (59)
- November 2013 (71)
- October 2013 (64)
- September 2013 (60)
- August 2013 (64)
- July 2013 (51)
- June 2013 (69)
- May 2013 (74)
- April 2013 (76)
- March 2013 (66)
- February 2013 (65)
- January 2013 (78)
- December 2012 (64)
- November 2012 (87)
- October 2012 (76)
- September 2012 (72)
- August 2012 (92)
- July 2012 (71)
- June 2012 (77)
- May 2012 (76)
- April 2012 (78)
- March 2012 (69)
- February 2012 (56)
- January 2012 (72)
- December 2011 (69)
- November 2011 (67)
- October 2011 (98)
- September 2011 (61)
- August 2011 (77)
- July 2011 (67)
- June 2011 (60)
- May 2011 (63)
- April 2011 (66)
- March 2011 (65)
- February 2011 (65)
- January 2011 (84)
- December 2010 (87)
- November 2010 (74)
- October 2010 (78)
- September 2010 (75)
- August 2010 (57)
- July 2010 (71)
- June 2010 (36)
Online texts
- Departments
- Contemporary Authors
- Beau Albrecht
- Michael Bell
- Alain de Benoist
- Kerry Bolton
- Jonathan Bowden
- Buttercup Dew
- Collin Cleary
- Giles Corey
- Jef Costello
- Morris V. de Camp
- F. Roger Devlin
- Bain Dewitt
- Jack Donovan
- Ricardo Duchesne
- Émile Durand
- Guillaume Durocher
- Mark Dyal
- Guillaume Faye
- Fullmoon Ancestry
- Jim Goad
- Tom Goodrich
- Alex Graham
- Andrew Hamilton
- Robert Hampton
- Huntley Haverstock
- Derek Hawthorne
- Gregory Hood
- Juleigh Howard-Hobson
- Richard Houck
- Nicholas R. Jeelvy
- Greg Johnson
- Ruuben Kaalep
- Julian Langness
- Travis LeBlanc
- Patrick Le Brun
- Trevor Lynch
- Kevin MacDonald
- G. A. Malvicini
- John Michael McCloughlin
- Margot Metroland
- Millennial Woes
- John Morgan
- James J. O'Meara
- Michael O'Meara
- Christopher Pankhurst
- Michael Polignano
- J. J. Przybylski
- Spencer J. Quinn
- Quintilian
- Edouard Rix
- C. B. Robertson
- C. F. Robinson
- Hervé Ryssen
- Kathryn S.
- Alan Smithee
- Ann Sterzinger
- Robert Steuckers
- Tomislav Sunić
- Donald Thoresen
- Marian Van Court
- Dominique Venner
- Irmin Vinson
- Michael Walker
- Scott Weisswald
- Leo Yankevich
- Classic Authors
- Maurice Bardèche
- Julius Evola
- Ernst Jünger
- D. H. Lawrence
- Charles Lindbergh
- Jack London
- H. P. Lovecraft
- Anthony M. Ludovici
- Sir Oswald Mosley
- National Vanguard
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Revilo Oliver
- William Pierce
- Ezra Pound
- Saint-Loup
- Savitri Devi
- Carl Schmitt
- Miguel Serrano
- Oswald Spengler
- P. R. Stephensen
- Jean Thiriart
- John Tyndall
- Francis Parker Yockey
Recent Comments
- inq on A Time for Intermarium
- Grey Wolf on A Time for Intermarium
- Grey Wolf on A Time for Intermarium
- Greg Johnson on Remembering Yukio Mishima (January 14, 1925–November 25, 1970)
- Walter on A Time for Intermarium
- joe bidden123 on Fundraiser Total & Sunday Livestream: Hour One: Paul WaggenerHour Two: Horus the Avenger
- joe bidden123 on Fundraiser Total & Sunday Livestream: Hour One: Paul WaggenerHour Two: Horus the Avenger
- Younfelf on Fundraiser Total & Sunday Livestream: Hour One: Paul WaggenerHour Two: Horus the Avenger
- Dr. Krieger on Remembering Yukio Mishima (January 14, 1925–November 25, 1970)
- Nicholas Bourbaki on When Your Child Dies for a Cause
- Robert Clingan on Fundraiser Total & Sunday Livestream: Hour One: Paul WaggenerHour Two: Horus the Avenger
- Jared Jared on The Mormons’ Minority Strategy
- KatS on Inheritors of the Earth: Port, Plain, & Mountain in Western Culture
- KatS on Inheritors of the Earth: Port, Plain, & Mountain in Western Culture
- Norman on A Time for Intermarium
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Part 1
760 words
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) is a long, quasi-autobiographical poem consisting of 18 parts. The first part is reprinted below with some annotations. Written in the aftermath of the First World War, it is one of Pound’s most accessible and compelling creations, evoking the anguish of the war and the disillusionment that followed–the social and intellectual crucible from which Fascism and National Socialism were to emerge. The version below follows the recording of Pound’s reading, in which he made two small changes from the original printed version.
E.P. ODE POUR L’ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE[1]
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus;[2] trout for factitious bait;
“Ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ’, ὅσ ‘ένι Τροίη”[3]
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.[4]
Unaffected by “the march of events,”
He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentuniesme
De son eage;[5] the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.
II.
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.
III.
The tea-rose tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,[6]
the pianola “replaces”
Sappho’s barbitos.[7]
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our days.
Even the Christian beauty
Defects—after Samothrace;
We see to kalon
Decreed in the market place.[8]
Faun’s flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint’s vision.
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus,[9]
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
O bright Apollo,
tin andra, tin heroa, tina theon,
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon![10]
IV.
These fought in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case . . .[11]
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria, non dulce non et decor . . .[12]
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V.
There died a myriad,
and of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
Notes
1. E. P. = Ezra Pound, “Ode for the Selection of His Tomb”
2. Capaneus: One of seven against Thebes struck down by lightning for his hubris.
3. From the sirens’ song, Odyssey XII, 189: “We know all the things that belong to Troy.”
4. Mottoes on sundials tend to speak of the shortness of life and the swiftness of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sundial_mottos
5. “In the thirty-first year of his life”; cf. the opening of Francois Villon’s Le Testament.
6. Mousseline of Cos: in Greco-Roman antiquity, a fine, light fabric from the Island of Cos.
7. Barbitos: a 7-stringed lyre-like instrument
8. Peisistratus: Athenian tyrant of the 6th century BCE.
9. “To kalon,” Greek for “the fine,” adopted as a brand name for soap.
10. Riffing on “What god, what hero, aye, what man shall we loudly praise!” from Pindar, Olympian Odes II, 2.
11. “For the house”
12. “For the fatherland, neither sweetly nor gloriously.” Inverting Horace, Odes III, ii, 13: “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (it is sweet and glorious to die for one’s fatherland).