A comparative study of Browning's Pippo Passes and Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by JONATHAN RABAN
' In a society which has fallen from the state of culture-In the sense in which Matthew Arnold used that word-what sort of poetry can there be but the lyrically archaic or the deliberately discontinuous and fragmented. Both Browning and Pound present the first of those two alternatives through the personae of Pippa and Mauberley, but the simple lyric is there to be rejected as unworkable. Browning and Pound need a language as pluralist and as disjunctive as the culture from which it issues.'
Pippa Passes: Monday at 8.30 p.m. (Radio 4)