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

Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGann, be thought to alter the poetic meaning of that
book‟s bibliographic code in the accent on insincere authorship that his efforts at de-
personalizing his narrative signaled, then it is also true that that volume contains what
seems to be its ontological opposite. Pound‟s complex antiquarianism, one that, in its
argument with Browning, disallows an endogenetic force to smooth over the exogenetic
details in the text that entertains them, also allows for another kind of historical recovery
that can be best comprehended as that which foundationally belongs to lost historical
interpretive traditions. Pound‟s “Propertius” tends towards the pole favored by “The
Allegorist,” then, in that it seeks to represent a submerged theme in Propertius‟s work
that would have been apparent to Propertius‟s contemporaries and from which a total
explanation of that Roman elegist‟s intentions may be expected. Pound‟s translation
offers a complicated interpretation of Propertius spurred by his critical awareness of how
Propertius would have been received by his knowing contemporary readers. In this sense,
Pound‟s reading is “allegorical” as it chooses to encounter Propertius‟s work “under the
sign of fragmentation and ruin” (Arcades 330). Pound‟s “antique” criticism, then, serves
those ends where the Allegorist orders the objects under his scrutiny by way of his
initiation into an order that lies outside their being and against which he can measure his
profundity, otherwise indiscernible from eisegetical impulses. Only by carefully
understanding how Pound‟s translation of Propertius is not strictly led by his own
peccadilloes, but purposefully reacts with the title it is collected under, might the antique
criticism Pound chooses to measure the wreck of Propertius‟s text against be gainfully
observed. Pound deploys the techniques Benjamin associates with modernist allegorical
expression in “Propertius,” but for the end of allowing that which contemporary criticism
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