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In a half savage country, out of date.

These lines come from Ezra Pound’s early poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920), a sequence that functions as a self-critique and a satire of the literary culture of Edwardian and post–World War I England. Pound writes through the persona “Mauberley,” a poet whose aesthetic ideals are out of step with modern life and the commercialized, philistine reception of art. The passage reflects Pound’s sense that an older, “sublime” tradition of poetry could not simply be revived in the modern age, and it also gestures toward his own position as an American expatriate—“born / In a half savage country”—trying to intervene in European literary tradition.

The speaker portrays a poet who spends years trying to revive a “dead art” and preserve “the sublime” in its older, elevated sense—an ambition that is both noble and doomed. Pound’s irony cuts two ways: the effort is “Wrong from the start,” yet “No, hardly,” suggesting sympathy for the impulse even as he judges it historically impossible. The phrase “out of key with his time” frames modernity as a changed musical or cultural pitch to which the poet cannot tune himself. The final admission—being “born / In a half savage country, out of date”—adds a bitterly self-aware note about cultural belatedness and the outsider’s struggle to inherit and renew a tradition that no longer fits the age.