The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

These lines open Ezra Pound’s poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920), written after World War I as Pound’s bitter reckoning with the cultural climate of early twentieth‑century Europe and the perceived failure of art to meet (or resist) modernity’s demands. The poem presents a satiric portrait of an aesthete-poet (Mauberley) and, by implication, Pound’s own earlier artistic ambitions, set against a society shaped by mass culture, speed, and the brutalizing effects of the war. The “modern stage” evokes both contemporary public life and the new artistic scene, while “Attic grace” gestures to classical Greek ideals that Pound felt had become untenable or unfashionable in the present age.

Pound suggests that the era insists on art that mirrors its own strained, hurried expression—an “accelerated grimace”—rather than the balanced beauty associated with classical (“Attic”) refinement. The lines can be read as both diagnosis and critique: modernity wants images that match its speed, anxiety, and spectacle, and it pressures artists to abandon older standards of harmony. At the same time, Pound implies that such demands deform artistic production, substituting a grimace for genuine expression. The stanza sets the poem’s central tension between aesthetic ideals and a modern world that commodifies experience and rewards the merely topical or sensational.