the great war and modernist poetry however, Pound’s reader frequently experiences allusions to chronicle legend and
literaryfable that are fetched from the depths of Mediterranean antiquity and
featured, it seems, for their very unfathomability. Consider, in this representative
catalogue, the interaction between the local knowingness of Pound’s persona and
the distant incomprehensibility of these citations, which, one by one, and with the
help of a classics manual, might be identified, but which, as substantial parts of a
single imaginative narrative, challenge almost any reader’s grasp of what the story
is, of what is actually going on here:
For Orpheus tamed the wild beasts—
andhelduptheThreicianriver;
And Cithaeron shook up the rocks by Thebes
and danced them into a bulwark at his pleasure,
And you, O Polyphemus? Did harsh Galatea almost
Turn to your dripping horses, because of a tune, under Aetna?
We must look into the matter.^14Who, most of us must ask, was Galatea? And how close did she get when she
‘almost’ turned to the horses of Polyphemus? That specifying adverb is Pound’s
interpolation,^15 whose blank space in the Latin original reveals the hollowness of his
own (carefully) concocted knowledgeability. There is a particularlypseudo-logical
quality to this tone, as indicated by another interpolated word, the first ‘For’.
This conjunction establishes the expectation of cause-and-effect sequence, the
impression that some logical proposition is in process. It builds some presentiment
of common-sense meanings, one that Pound complements with those reassuring
wordsofcommonspeech.Hesteadilyundercutsthispromise,however,byenforcing
the awareness that we do not know these mythological personages very well, if at all.
‘We must’, the next interpolation goes, ‘look into the matter’; but when we do, we
see through the easy loquacity, the familiarizing fiction of inserted words like these,
and find reason-seemingness as the aim and intended effect. Pound’s new conceit
echoes to the background sound of these times, and the immense pressure this
moment exerts on his verse is shared as the working conditions of his conational
and modernist accomplice.
III
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Eliot’s arrival in London in early August 1914 (having fled Germany, where, at
Marsburg, in early summer, he had begun a year of study abroad) coincides with
(^14) Ibid. 206.
(^15) The relevant texts of Propertius’s Latin and a standard prose translation are provided helpfully
by K. K. Ruthven,A Guide to Ezra Pound’s ‘Personae’ 1926(Berkeley: University of California Press,
1969); this is arranged by the alphabetized sequence of Pound’s poem’s titles.