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

delineate Pound's portrayals as faithful character reproductions. If this were the case, we
would not have the controversy over logopoeia in the Homage‖ (Mages 74). Pound's
second technique was formed in his seeing how far his own use of logopoeia (ironic word
choice) might go to enliven a dead poet for a modern audience. Wright makes the point
that:
Pound's avowed purpose in the Homage ―was to bring a dead man
to life, to present a living figure‖. In so doing we are presented,
interestingly enough, with three different personae – the first being
the ancient speaker, the second the modern poet, and the third a
combination of the two in the final text. (Wright 136)
Sullivan compliments Wright‘s finding. He finds that while Pound's errors are entirely in
keeping with Imagist doctrine, the poem itself suffers from being too greatly under
Propertius's influence – rather than its being the product of the kind of blended author
that Wright locates. Holding this position allows Sullivan to do an end-run on those
classicists who lament that the real Propertian themes, tones, and sensitivities had been
perverted by Pound's liberty. This doctrinaire fidelity to Pound‘s later comments on his
poem misses the insight that recent critics like Wright have shed on the variety of
different intentions and authors at play in his translation. Wright‘s adumbration of the
possible authorial voices in Propertius aligns his criticism with that impersonation school
of criticism encountered in those current explanations of the Ur-Cantos discussed in the
last chapter.
There are, in fact, various ways of explaining what it was that informed Pound's
motives. Sullivan argued that Pound wanted to modernize Propertius‘s romantic quest by
giving it a degree of self-protective sophistication. This allows us to see Propertius as
being less the victim of Cynthia's hysteria than as a poet willing to engage in the
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