Source 3 pg.27 by Liliana Gutierrez

lgutierrez17 — 2016-12-01 15:07:05 UTC

“Paracelsus in Excelsis” is a poem which responds directly to Browning’s “Paracelsus,” though in its form it is closer to the brief lyric reveries which Pound was writing at the same time than it is to the more fully developed dramatic monologue.

lgutierrez17 — 2016-12-01 15:07:31 UTC

The poem is interesting, however, because it offers the thoughts of a sixteenth-century alchemist whose successful escape from the world of matter is identical with the symbolist quest to penetrate the mortal veil

lgutierrez17 — 2016-12-01 15:12:47 UTC

Men have I known and men, but never one
Was grown so free an essence, or become
So simply element as what I am.
The mist goes from the mirror and I see.
Behold! the world of forms is swept beneath—

lgutierrez17 — 2016-12-01 15:13:20 UTC

The symbolist endeavor was based on a kind of alchemy of words, and Pound thought of it in those terms.

lgutierrez17 — 2016-12-01 15:13:45 UTC

But Pound had other interests as well, which would soon lead him to disassociate himself from the symbolists.