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

Propertius frequently manages to use mythological situations
symbolically, a fairly rare distinction which he shares with Horace
and Virgil. Myth (as in the originals of Sections I and II of the
Homage) becomes a language in which he can talk of his poetic
aims and methods. Not infrequently he succeeds in fusing erotic
mythology with his own situation and this effectively adds a third
dimension to his affair with Cynthia (for instance, ii 29A; compare
with section X of the Homage). (Sullivan 44)
Pound edits Propertius‘s mythical similes, omits them largely as ornament and, when
moved, uses them sparingly to thicken the texture of his translation. This renders Cynthia
a hazy impression, intentionally stirring the sort of false memories for a romantic
―classicism‖ that Propertius‘s modern translator-interpreters serve to represent. Pound‘s
ironic skewering of this pretense turns Propertius's sense of loss over Cynthia into a
vehicle for Pound‘s wider concern for what modernity sacrifices when it loses touch with
its Greek roots.
Pound amplifies his lament about the state of the improper contemporary
assessment of Propertius. Pound inflects his treatment of Cynthia such that he is able to
render the import of Propertius‘s praise more clearly. Propertius, that is, uses Cynthia to
criticize a Roman culture that vapidly cites Alexandrian precursors while forgetting the
actual agonies that their myths were concerned to allegorize. That is, Pound's rendering
of Propertius's own life anticipates the sexual cynicism exemplified by Ovid who uses
the word ―pasiphae‖ in Book One of Ars Amatoriae to degrade women, the word
implying that a woman's libido, once aroused, can become so unruly that she may lust for
a bull. Pound connects Propertius to Ovid through his shared (Pound-Ovid) critique of the
Roman elegiac strategy that makes stories of personal pain, war, and impoverishment,
into etiolated allegoric psychomachia. Pound's discovery of this aspect of Propertius is
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