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

of Propertius has abducted and concealed – his fate as the inheritor of an Alexandrian
elegiac tradition that was under attack and being soon repressed by his Roman, empire-
happy, contemporaries.
It is customary to regard the influence of Propertius on Ovid as being negative.
That is, we assume that where Propertius' Monobiblion was a sincere portrait of his
tempestuous affair with Cynthia, Ovid acts as a tonic, offering his readers a cynical
portrait of the ideals of Roman love elegy that Propertius innocently exploited. While
Ovid is satiric, this rule of thumb has recently been rethought not to obtain with Ovid‟s
Ars Amatoria. Critics now argue that the exemplary stance taken by the Encyclopedia
Brittanica in 1911 which described the Ars as “[p]erhaps the most immoral book ever
written by a man of genius” is mistaken:
But it is these sorts of assumptions that apparently have caused
many critics either to miss or to underestimate the emphasis of the
Ars Amatoria on moderation and restraint. Ovid's version of
moderation is often playful and ultimately subversive; but his
insistence upon it is clear. (Excess and Restraint: Propertius,
Horace, & Ovid's Ars Amatoriae 3)
Instead, Pound uses the half line from the Ars, ―quia pauper amavi,‖ to register his
commitment to a hermeneutic practice advanced in his 1911 article ―I Gather the Limbs
of Osiris,‖ where he complains about the dependence of modern art practices on
presentist strategies of mimetic representation for their symptomatic inability to convey
historic realities. He advances an alternative called the ―Method of the Luminous Detail‖
that allows him to register the reality of Ovid‘s conduct book in its relationship to the
object of its proximate criticism, the sincere love poetry of its predecessor, Propertius‘s
love elegies.
71