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

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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 81
Pound's genius was to see Propertius' gift for marrying predictable rhythms with intonational ironies. Propertius grabs his Latin whole and offers: ―language charged with meaning to the utmost degree‖ (Osiris?). By refining his deployment of irony through the defamiliarization of nearly lost Alexandrian allusions and a generative grammar led by cadence and internal rhyme, ―by which the normal selectional rules of a particular language are broken in poetry, a rupture which contributes substantially to the overall effect being aimed at‖ (32). Pound could make the case that Propertius was an early practitioner of logopoeia as he takes account ―of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances‖ (Osiris 32). In addition to its being a useful venue for Pound to demonstrate the significance of logopoeia to Iris Barry, Homage was, in itself, another installment in a line of ironic anti-empire poems he was writing in the late teens and early twenties: [The ―Homage to Sextus Propertius‖] presents certain emotions as vital to me in 1917, faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire, as they were to Propertius some centuries earlier, when faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire. These emotions are defined largely, but not entirely, in Propertius‘s own terms. If the reader does not find relation to life defined in the poem, he may conclude that I have been unsuccessful in my endeavor. I certainly omitted no means of definition that I saw open to me, including shortenings, cross cuts, implications derivable from other writings of Propertius, as for example the ―Ride to Lanuvium‖ [IV. Viii.] from which I have taken a color of tone but no direct or entire expression. (Letters 231) In addition, Pound's January 1920 letter to the London Observer reiterates the ―Homage‖'s purpose in presenting the Monobiblion‘s ―relation to life,‖ recorded in the letter above: ―Leaving aside the personal aspect, the possible merit or demerit of a character sketch which never was, and never intended to be, an ad verbum translation; in 82
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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
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Christopher David Chapman practice.
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CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
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objectification, while titles are a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
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taboo, as the following remark indi
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emind us too hastily only of Benjam
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e renewed in philosophical contempl
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the word “Title.” I do this out
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where fate - the agent of nature‟
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Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
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come into their meaning through the
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meaning in the words he appoints to
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―The Role of Language in Trauersp
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God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
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conceived of as a pantomime where t
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ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
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aspects of his linguistic theory th
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decision-making powers, we can demo
Page 39 and 40: him to transpose arguments about th
Page 41 and 42: Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
Page 43 and 44: eath of this world, and from it the
Page 45 and 46: magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
Page 47 and 48: elegated to the setting in which th
Page 49 and 50: Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
Page 51 and 52: every locution being, in essence, e
Page 53 and 54: CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
Page 55 and 56: dramatic monologue, a feat he would
Page 57 and 58: terms that this chapter wishes to c
Page 59 and 60: structural factitiousness that the
Page 61 and 62: is implicit to baroque criticisms o
Page 63 and 64: meaning of the poems it collects. P
Page 65 and 66: Pound's fragments as commentary on
Page 67 and 68: Few critics read these poems in the
Page 69 and 70: a diorama booth in which his hero a
Page 71 and 72: the genetic milieu into which it be
Page 73 and 74: In fact, two complaints can be hear
Page 75 and 76: while keeping lines that praise Bro
Page 77 and 78: Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
Page 79 and 80: Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
Page 81 and 82: George Steiner uncovers the ramific
Page 83 and 84: to register history differently to
Page 85 and 86: commitment to past modes of critica
Page 87 and 88: modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
Page 89: the case, is deliberately making ou
Page 93 and 94: delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
Page 95 and 96: presence of a continuous patina of
Page 97 and 98: described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
Page 99 and 100: 10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
Page 101 and 102: obsessive desire most critics find
Page 103 and 104: passing from hand to hand, becomes
Page 105 and 106: Propertius as Propertius once had C
Page 107 and 108: saw no viable future for his own ex
Page 109 and 110: then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
Page 111 and 112: ‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
Page 113 and 114: difference between his intention an
Page 115 and 116: itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
Page 117 and 118: subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
Page 119 and 120: his subjectivity as a blend of fact
Page 121 and 122: eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
Page 123 and 124: dogmatic binding and over which to
Page 125 and 126: Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
Page 127 and 128: Mill, Jackson notes, finds the conc
Page 129 and 130: apostrophe to ‗Misery‘ performa
Page 131 and 132: ―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
Page 133 and 134: to posit a fictional author being n
Page 135 and 136: neither Rainey‘s Institutions of
Page 137 and 138: y Piero della Francesca. Pound was
Page 139 and 140: E gradment li antichi cavaler roman
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that have not traditionally been co
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The library of the dukes of Milan w
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Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
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Bornstein, for example, is interest
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the meaning of Pound‘s text by co
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Do come, do come. I can see us at B
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the political implications of that
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the winners of its game (148). Beca
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iography and how he can be seen to
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to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
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view of Pound‘s political beliefs
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which to describe the force of natu
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interrogation of that two-word theo
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elationships that they believed to
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commemoration is to writing (Derrid
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knowable “as a combination of ato
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new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
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ejects any teleological argument fo
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Ontologies, such as those that belo
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this mystery could only be experien
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attention to the way names effect t
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Adorno acknowledges that Kant‘s w
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understanding how de-personalizatio
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Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
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WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
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The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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