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despairing over Cynthia's infidelity, offers the careful reader the solace that all sexuality is a road to perdition, comically implied by the sardonic way Propertius portrays his rival. 4.8 offers the image of an overpowering sexual rival, a ―vulsus nepos,‖ that accompanies Cynthia to Lanuvium. The rival is a contradictory figure, though. He is fortune‘s favorite for the evening, but otherwise impotent. The depilated younger man is designed to figure as an image of that which is sexually amorphous, an object for both male and female attention. This is his resource. He needs to make himself smooth because he is, in fact, aging: Propertius‘s jibe that his rival must soon sell himself as a gladiator speaks to the other man's spendthrift habits, but also to the imminent disappearance of his wealth's source. Propertius depicts his rival less as Cynthia's compliment than her mirror: the nepos, too, depends precariously upon his sexuality for his daily bread. Cynthia's sudden return from her tryst with him hints that this rather pathetic figure, youth and finances dwindling, cannot in truth bear the weight of Propertius's grand jealousy: Propertius is surprised in flagrante delicto because he expected the nepos to keep her happily occupied rather longer than the poor man could manage. (120 Janan) Sexuality is as often a masquerade as it is a source of romantic attraction and love. In fact Propertius‘s insights must be seen as stronger than a mere reflection on Cynthia. At this point in the poem Propertius ridicules the device that has allowed him to portray himself as the slave of love: Cynthia is an allegory for poetry itself. The most obvious level on which this is true is that, inasmuch as Cynthia is the first word of the first poem, she would have served as the title of the Monobiblos according to ancient poetic practice. Propertius, thus, later speaks of his Cynthia being read all over town (2.24.2), meaning the Monobiblos. By the same token, when the poet says he wins fame through Cynthia, the statement is humorously double-edged, meaning both his poetry and the love affair he professes to recount therein. On this level, Cynthia's infidelity, her 93
passing from hand to hand, becomes a metaphor of the successful poet's fame. Thus what is most a cause for the character Propertius's shame – his being betrayed by his mistress – is the sign of the poet Propertius's glory. (Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real. Paul Allen Miller 63-4) Miller confirms the association between ―Cynthia‖ and ―poetry‖ by reminding us that the correspondence would have been granted by the coterie of elegy readers Propertius wrote for. ―Cynthia‖ was a name linked to the poetry of Cornelius Gallus, the first Roman Elegist. It stood as a metonym for the genre. Gallus‘s work mentioned Mount Cynthius on the isle of Delos as being Callimachus's (the Alexandrian pater familias to the Roman Elegists) proper home. ―That association was reproduced by Vergil's sixth Eclogue where the god directing Vergilian discourse away from epic material was given the cult title Cynthius‖ (64). Miller traces the use of the masculine form, Cynthius, through Meleager and Catullus. The opening lines of the Monobiblios are a direct imitation of lines from Meleager. The imitation of Meleager, however, contains ironies that have not been noted. Cynthia is prima, but the announcement of her firstness is a quotation and hence already secunda. If we recall the literary significance of Cynthia being the first (prima) word of the poem, then the programmatic nature of this statement becomes clear. It also indicates that the poetry that follows will be organized around polarities and inversions such that the surface meaning is often at odds with that contained in the subtext. Cynthia might be first but only in a way that announces her as second. The poem itself, rather than having a stable centre, functions as the locus for a series of tensions between a set of analogous polarities and their inversions. (Miller 85) Pound's translation, then, takes these series of textual tensions and relations and recasts them in a new idiom. Hooley finds this modernizing gesture in the initial lines of the homage where Pound takes: 94
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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
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Christopher David Chapman practice.
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CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
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objectification, while titles are a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
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taboo, as the following remark indi
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emind us too hastily only of Benjam
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e renewed in philosophical contempl
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the word “Title.” I do this out
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where fate - the agent of nature‟
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Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
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come into their meaning through the
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meaning in the words he appoints to
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―The Role of Language in Trauersp
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God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
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conceived of as a pantomime where t
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ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
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aspects of his linguistic theory th
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decision-making powers, we can demo
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him to transpose arguments about th
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Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
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eath of this world, and from it the
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magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
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elegated to the setting in which th
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Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
Page 51 and 52: every locution being, in essence, e
Page 53 and 54: CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
Page 55 and 56: dramatic monologue, a feat he would
Page 57 and 58: terms that this chapter wishes to c
Page 59 and 60: structural factitiousness that the
Page 61 and 62: is implicit to baroque criticisms o
Page 63 and 64: meaning of the poems it collects. P
Page 65 and 66: Pound's fragments as commentary on
Page 67 and 68: Few critics read these poems in the
Page 69 and 70: a diorama booth in which his hero a
Page 71 and 72: the genetic milieu into which it be
Page 73 and 74: In fact, two complaints can be hear
Page 75 and 76: while keeping lines that praise Bro
Page 77 and 78: Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
Page 79 and 80: Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
Page 81 and 82: George Steiner uncovers the ramific
Page 83 and 84: to register history differently to
Page 85 and 86: commitment to past modes of critica
Page 87 and 88: modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
Page 89 and 90: the case, is deliberately making ou
Page 91 and 92: Pound's genius was to see Propertiu
Page 93 and 94: delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
Page 95 and 96: presence of a continuous patina of
Page 97 and 98: described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
Page 99 and 100: 10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
Page 101: obsessive desire most critics find
Page 105 and 106: Propertius as Propertius once had C
Page 107 and 108: saw no viable future for his own ex
Page 109 and 110: then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
Page 111 and 112: ‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
Page 113 and 114: difference between his intention an
Page 115 and 116: itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
Page 117 and 118: subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
Page 119 and 120: his subjectivity as a blend of fact
Page 121 and 122: eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
Page 123 and 124: dogmatic binding and over which to
Page 125 and 126: Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
Page 127 and 128: Mill, Jackson notes, finds the conc
Page 129 and 130: apostrophe to ‗Misery‘ performa
Page 131 and 132: ―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
Page 133 and 134: to posit a fictional author being n
Page 135 and 136: neither Rainey‘s Institutions of
Page 137 and 138: y Piero della Francesca. Pound was
Page 139 and 140: E gradment li antichi cavaler roman
Page 141 and 142: that have not traditionally been co
Page 143 and 144: The library of the dukes of Milan w
Page 145 and 146: Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
Page 147 and 148: Bornstein, for example, is interest
Page 149 and 150: the meaning of Pound‘s text by co
Page 151 and 152: Do come, do come. I can see us at B
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the political implications of that
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the winners of its game (148). Beca
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iography and how he can be seen to
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to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
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view of Pound‘s political beliefs
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which to describe the force of natu
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interrogation of that two-word theo
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elationships that they believed to
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commemoration is to writing (Derrid
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knowable “as a combination of ato
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new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
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ejects any teleological argument fo
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Ontologies, such as those that belo
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this mystery could only be experien
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attention to the way names effect t
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Adorno acknowledges that Kant‘s w
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understanding how de-personalizatio
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Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
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WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
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The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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