TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

Propertius as Propertius once had Cynthia. Ironically, this comes by way of Pound's
enlivening that part of his poetry aimed at skewering the pretenses of Roman propaganda,
the very stuff that made Cynthia's promiscuity adulatory and the implied title of
Propertius‘s work that Propertius had used to cunningly camouflage himself from
criticism. The burial of Propertius is accomplished through Pound‘s understanding that
the sexual cynicism we once appointed to Ovid was learned from Propertius. Through the
work of recovering an antique form of the critical understanding of what Propertius‘s
elegies meant as both satirical protests against empire, and as complicated
commemorations of the Alexandrian tradition that avoids ―the rut of pompous epic
poetry,‖ Pound can demonstrate in his allegorical citation of Propertius‘s mythopoetic
ornament the reality of a crucial moment in Propertius‘s original reception, free from the
contemporary taboo that was placed on such a reading, in the natural history of the
elegiac tradition. That the elemental force of nature in this history was Propertius‘s desire
to criticize empire‘s imbecility, camouflaged behind the street name for elegiac poetry,
―Cynthia,‖ that he was undermining, must have struck Pound as fortunate.
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