Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is Pound’s farewell to London, his home from the age of 23 to 35 (1908-1920). Much of HSM is concerned with criticising that society, and the above quatrain is often quoted, in particular the “tawdry cheapness,” as a prime example of this criticism. Alice Steiner Amdur goes further, mentioning the use of cliché “to epitomize a mood, a trick that would have had no meaning except for [Pound and Eliot’s] long war on the cliché.” However I would like to address an immense complexity contained within this stanza that is a result of its reference to “Sage Heracleitus.”

Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, or poet, or riddler whose work remains to us in fragments. His most famous fragment, πάντα ῥεῖ, is referenced by Pound in the first line of this stanza.

Otherwise referred to as “everything is in flux,” the exhibition catalogue to this idea is weighty. But while one might put it to politics, and another to relationship, it is Heraclitus who achieves the image.

Firstly we should appreciate Heraclitus’s melopoeia (the music of his words). The line sounds something like this: potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin, hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei (source). Peter Adamson, in the episode for Heraclitus on the BBC podcast In Our Time, likens the sound to the babbling of water. That’s a little too poetical for me. What’s really going on is a game of change in the sound itself.

Secondly note the logopoeia (wordplay), for there is an ambiguity in the possession of the word “same”. It can belong either to the river, or to the man. This is deliberate, we are supposed to explore this ambiguity, and we reach the loudest meaning when we apply ‘same’ to both: the same man cannot step into the same river twice. Not only has the river changed, but so too the person.

The first fragment, πάντα ῥεῖ (“everything flows”), is loaded with the inconsistency from τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν (“the same man cannot step into the same river twice”). Pound’s sneer always joked on persistence, but with a little extra understanding of the Heraclitean philosophy, the “tawdry cheapness” becomes not only a criticism on society but on human nature.

Yet Pound had achieved that in the first edition of the poem, published in 1920 by the Ovid Press and again in the 1920 September edition of The Dial.

While some of the revisions between the 1920 and 1921 editions seem inconsequential, the change here — “reign throughout” to “outlast” — makes a promotion. The promotion is this:

Here is the river. The river is all. It flows with time, and we are born into and out of it, it bears and births life. To outlast that river is an impossibility. We are given a paradox. Surely no thing can be greater than everything.

There was no problem when the tawdry cheapness reigned throughout. It sat upon its throne, wed to everything below. The all did not have an end and nothing changed. But then Pound changed it, a certain obsession of his which I believe is linked to form, and in doing so introduced a second Heraclitean concept: the unity of opposites.

It would be sensible to now provide a gallery of Heraclitean fragments, and to charm the reader towards the heights of thought here. However, fearing the mass of footnotes that ask to be included, I shall jump straight to the root.

The point is that if we count degrees in a circle, the last one is 259.9 recurring, which is 360, which is the first one, 0. The question posed is how much do you have to change something for it to differ? The Heraclitean answer is both enormously, yet not at all. And those two cases are equal.

The infinitesimal distinction is extrapolated in both directions. If we extrapolate inwards we have an immediate unity (equality). If we extrapolate outwards we are provided with the opposite, yet in the case of the circle the opposite comes back round again. If we think for too long on that situation we might be lead to visualisations of the infinity symbol or The Ying and Yang with its souls in the other’s part. One scholar, Celso Vieira, says “the union [of opposites] is not a cyclical movement always going in one direction but rather a rectilinear reciprocal one that allows the opposites to be in perpetual strife with one another.” But I believe the Heraclitean concept is more harmonious than Vieira makes out.

What does this mean for the tawdry cheapness? How does it advance a critique on human nature? In fact, we begin to observe the nature of the tawdry cheapness instead. In one case, the tawdry cheapness becomes a defining feature of the universe; all exists within it. This is quite similar to our earlier observations and would have been available to anyone with imagination. But the beautiful addition that comes from the unity of opposites is that not only is the tawdry cheapness so large, but it is also atomic. And does this not suit the criticism itself, that the presiding feature of society is originated in our petty behaviour? It is through the Heraclitean concepts that Pound turns a slur into a diagnosis.

There is so much more to say about Heraclitus, his view that all things exchange into fire and out again, the commonality of his λόγος, the psychological Fragment 41, and the very Poundian 36: “The sun is new each day.”

But our final observation should be that Ezra Pound achieves the reconstruction of the perspective and philosophy of Heraclitus through both his reference and his choice of word. The Heraclitean concept is what I have seen to be the capacity of form, and I think that all form should be realised as a strife towards this kind of goal, where form provides for us a path for thought. When we look at form in The Cantos, we mostly see it as a scheme of arrangement, but we should always keep in mind its purpose, its meaning, and its experience.