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

seduction as an insincere game. In simple, Ovid is not absorbed in the stance that allows
the women that he seduces their autonomous purity before they are assimilated to his
purposes as objects of prey. Propertius is entirely absorbed. He desires to rescue Cynthia.
He dreams of Cynthia lost at sea. He is clearly worried about her reputation.
Pound sets aside Propertius‘s absorption with Cynthia and develops the theme
concerning Propertius‘s poetic inheritance and how to navigate it in a culture demanding
monuments to imperial glory – a way of emphasizing the aspect of inheritance implicated
in the ―underworld‖ theme that Brooke-Rose mentions. Pound highlights those aspects of
Propertius‘s poetry that deal with the role of the artist in society. The portrait of jealousy,
rapture, quarreling, and infidelity that Propertius delivers is left hanging by Pound for
those areas where he adumbrates the tenuous position of the poet in a society organized
around regimes of patronage that require poets to produce monumental poems dedicated
to the prowess and honor of the emperor. Sullivan explains how Pound responds to the
romantic element in Propertius‘s poetry, finding that the ―Cynthia‖ motif is a useful ruse
for his own more direct critique of empire's reifying disciplines and hierarchy:
Pound is accentuating the conventional nature of this sort of thing
in Roman poetry; the sophistication in Propertius is balanced here
by the sophistication of the Poundian verse techniques, but against
that, it must be said that the continued use of this tone makes us
lose sight of the passion that makes itself felt in Propertius‘s style –
even at its most ironic and when it is working through stock
themes and images. Pound seems to assimilate Propertius to Ovid.
(57)
Pound reorients Propertius along the Ovidian axis of intelligent restraint, and in so doing
offers a new way to read the sincere romantic elegy. Critics accuse Pound of perverting
or straining the sense of Propertius‘s lament, especially in his redacted versions (4 and
89