vincent sherry
alternate voice within his own literary English. This opportunity locates the motive
forthe otherwise idiosyncratic labour of ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ (1919),
the (highly) creative translation Pound undertook as his main poetic endeavour
through the second half of the war.^11
This Roman poet was chosen also for reasons beyond Pound’s imaginative
interests in linguistic difference. In hisElegiae, Propertius presents himself as a poet
desiring to write of love when conventional expectation pressures him to proclaim a
martial-minded verse. A poet of this moment is supposed to celebrate the imperial
aims and military campaigns of the Augustan dynasty. His crafty engagement
with those rules shows his persona making his evident requests for permission to
sing about ‘Cynthia’, but addressing instead, more interestingly and slyly, quietly
and indeed devastatingly, the attitudes and practices of an imperial poetics.^12 The
mock-heroic diction of hisElegiae, his parodic Virgilisms, the hollow triumphalism
and empty finishes of those all-too-heavily laboured martial cadences, which turn
Augustan verse convention into august inanities: Propertius provides Pound with
a model for echoing the times against the times. This is a pattern that the modern
poet adapts to the syntax and vocabulary of his own political present.
The opening verse paragraph of Pound’s poem recasts its Latin original in an
extensive interpolation, which, in the guise of a poet’s invocation of his Roman
muse, acknowledges the deity reigning over the discourses of the current war:
Out-weariers of Apollo will, as we know, continue their Martian generalities,
We have kept our erasers in order.^13Liberal divinity, god of logic as well as music and poetry, Apollo has been suborned
to the work of current verse, worn out not by generals but by the ‘generalities’ of
war, by political abstraction, by ideological argument. How, Propertius-like, might
he play along with and pull against this existing linguistic condition?
The verbal art special to ‘Propertius’ features an interplay between an archly
rationalist syntax and a wittily impenetrable vocabulary. On one side, the persona
of the classics translator demonstrates a declarative knowingness about themateria
poetica, here the site of ancient history and myth. Moving easily through this range
of reference, Pound’s speaker builds a progression of apparently factual statements
as logical, common-sensible propositions of obvious knowledge. On the other side,
(^11) In a letter to Iris Barry, 27 July 1916, Pound refers to a project of translating Propertius as a
Roman poet of especially timely interest and relevance (inSelected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–41,
ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 90). Humphrey Carpenter quotes an unpublished
letter by Pound to his father, 3 Nov. 1918, as likely evidence that the poem has been completed recently
(Carpenter,A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound(London: Faber, 1988), 324).
(^12) An account of Propertius’s address to contemporary verse conventions is provided by J. P.
Sullivan,Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation(Austin, Tex.: University
of Texas Press, 1964), 58–64, 75–6.
(^13) Pound, ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, inPersonae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound,ed.Lea
Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 205.