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

the case, is deliberately making outrageous mistakes to present us with the sort of person
with a degree in Classics produced by British universities to run the Empire, a man
sufficiently competent in Latin to get a lot right, sufficiently pretentious to produce a
learned periphrasis, and sufficiently incompetent to subvert the whole point of a
particular passage‖ (Arkins 37).
Another of those letters Pound sent to Iris Barry admits of the difficulties that
Pound has in situating himself inside a canon of reception, and how these problems had
been the same for Propertius, as he once attempted to utilize Alexandrian motifs in the
Roman elegy tradition at a time when the call to write propaganda was at its highest
pitch. Specifically, the problem that Pound broaches with Barry concerns what it was he
and Propertius were to do with the moribund traditions that they were each inheriting –
traditions that demanded the celebration of an ineffectual empire: ―The value being that
the Roman poets are the only ones we know of who had approximately the same
problems as we have. The metropolis, the imperial posts to all corners of the world‖
(Letters 141). ―The Homage,‖ Pound would also write, ―presents certain emotions as vital
to me in 1917 faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire‖
(310) [cited in Arkins 29]. Where Propertius could only stress the nature of his own way
with the art of poetry in the opening of his third book, Pound takes the liberty of
assuming the authority of his own thought to underline the significance of art in a dying
culture. The relationship between art and culture governs the first two poems of the
Homage. In ―Notes on Elizabethan Classicists,‖ Pound writes, ―When the classics were a
new beauty and ecstasy people cared a damn sight more about the meaning of the
authors, and a damn sight less about their grammar and philology...it is perhaps important
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