Forms of Irony: Modern and Post-Modern

In this paper I would like to examine a rather special kind of irony that could be justly called 'comparative irony'. What I have in mind is the case when an author, in order to show the worthlessness of his own age, juxtaposes some well-known cultural values of the past with their obviously less valuable present-time equivalents. My examples, the two works that I would like to compare from this point of view, were created almost at the same time, in the same cultural milieu, by very close acquaintances, and with very different results. I will compare T. S. Eliot's masterpiece, The Waste Land with Ezra Pound's less known Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and especially their different intertextual uses of the same locus from the Divina Commedia.