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

that the classics should be humanly, rather than philologically taught, even in class-
rooms‖ (Literary Essays 240-41).
Brooks Otis, an esteemed American Classicist, confirms Pound‘s opinion. In 1965
Otis would argue that the textual problems in Propertius too often received more attention
than his meaning [Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 70.1 (1965)]. Pound would
have us recall Propertius for his thoughts about art, sexual love, humor, rhythm, and
logopoetic word-play. T.S. Eliot, in his introduction to Pound‘s Selected Poems, credits
Pound with having found the forgotten element of humor in Propertius: ―It is also a
criticism of Propertius, a criticism which in a most interesting way insists upon an
element of humour, of irony and mockery, in Propertius, which Mackail and other
interpreters have missed. I think that Pound is critically right, and that Propertius was
more civilized than most of his interpreters have admitted‖ (PAGE). In fact, Pound's
interest in demonstrating Propertius‘s significance to Barry was originally constrained to
the task of foregrounding Propertius‘s play with musical cadence. Propertius, Pound
argued, was exemplary of the Imagist credo that one composes ―in sequence of the
musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome‖ (A FEW DON‘TS/Osiris). Otis will
say, ―Propertius exploits the division of the dactylic hexameter by the caesura and the
natural division of the pentameter into two half lines; one facet of this is to place both at
the caesura and at the end of a line, a word with the same final syllable and so produce a
kind of internal rhyme‖ (31-32):
Cynthia prima suis/ miserum me cepit ocellis
contactum nullis/ ante cupidinibus
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