ABSTRACT
Mr. Ezra Pound's 'Homage to Sextus Propertius' has drawn an American Professor of Latin into the pages of the American magazine Poetry. Professor Hale is indignant at the attempt of Mr. Pound to make Propertius intelligible as well as merely accessible to the modem English reader, and in the name of Scholarship, he begs Mr. Pound to 'lay aside the mask of erudition' and to confess himself nothing better than a poet. With some of Professor Hale's literal criticismsitisimpossible not to agree. Speaking in the name of the schools, he is frequently correct. But in the name of the humanities, of life, of art, of literature, what in the world does it matter that Mr. Pound has spelled Punic with a capital when he meant a small letter, or that he has forgotten the existence of the Marcian aqueduct? Mr. Pound did not set out with the intention of making a literal translation of Propertius. He set out with the intention of creating in English verse a verse reincarnation, as it were, of Propertius, a 'homage' to Propertius that should take the form of rendering him a contemporary of our own. And, secondly, all criticism based on the text of Propertius is invalid unless it is accompanied by a perception of the psychological quality of Propertius as he lived. But Professor Hale, it is clear, has no sense for this higher kind of criticism, for he complains that there is 'no hint' in Propertius's text of 'certain decadent meanings' which Mr. Pound attributes to him. Is there not, indeed? Accepting decadence in its modern American meaning, Propertius can only be said to be full of it. No literary critic, accustomed to reading through and between an author's lines, whether they be Latin, Greek or English, can doubt the evidence of his trained senses that the mind behind the text of Propertius was a mind which the Latin Professor of the Chicago University would call decadent, if only it expressed itself in English. The facts that Propertius was a poet contemporary with Ovid, that he wrote of the life of the luxurious Roman Empire . . . that he was a child of his age. . . . What, in fact, distinguishes Propertius is his aesthetic reaction against decadence, against the very decadence in which he had been brought up, and with which he had sympathized. But this is not to admit that 'no hint of certain decadent meanings' is to be found in him. . . .
