[In the following essay, Bovie considers the impact of Propertius on certain poems of Ezra Pound and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.]

Little is known of the life of Sextus Propertius. He was a Roman citizen, and an Italian who like St. Francis and Raphael came from the region of Umbria. He was born, probably at Assisi, around 50 B.C., and died some forty years later after earning recognition as a lyric poet whose main theme was love. Propertius' father died while Propertius was still a boy, and his mother during Propertius' early manhood; so the poet seems to have grown up and followed his literary inclinations alone and unguided. The loss of his patrimony in the confiscations of 41-40 B.C. meant reduced circumstances, and Propertius turned away from the public career for which his conventional rhetorical education had prepared him, to become a poet instead. His morafity, like a painter's, consisted in "getting up before noon and keeping his brushes dry." His attention, like a mystic's, was concentrated on the most important person he could name, Cynthia.

Love for this mistress, which took the form of an ungovernable passion, "taught me," Propertius says, "to hate chaste young women and abandon any thought of a career." But he enjoyed a career, nevertheless, to which his 92 elegies bear various and ample witness. Because of these poems, distributed in four successive books, he came to rank alongside Catullus and Ovid and to be thought of as something like the brother-poet of his slightly older contemporary, Tibullus. Ovid himself listed Propertius in the conventional canon of writers of love lyrics; Horace paid him a left-handed compliment in The Epistle to Florus; Quintilian pointed out that some critics rated Propertius first among elegiac poets, although he himself would place Tibullus first and Propertius second on the list.

Tibullus and Propertius both wrote love poetry in the same form, the elegiac meter (one hexameter line alternating with one slightly shorter pentameter line), often in the same vein and often similar in subject and decorative detail. Each had a mistress to whom significantly passionate poems are addressed, each mentions a minor woman but is preoccupied with contending for the favors of the main woman in his life and so becomes expert on the general subject of being in love. Tibullus is the quiet, clear and craftsmanlike poet; Propertius is the daring, difficult, experimental writer. Tibullus largely and Propertius occasionally evoke the pastoral imagery that regularly adorns the classical miming for being in love—a rural, enameled background as the chief scenery in which their lilting couplets pirouette to describe love as the dominant experience.

But these properties are shared by other writers in the tradition if not in the same balance and form that tempts us to consider Propertius and Tibullus together. Catullus at the beginning and Ovid at the end of the classical tradition of romantic poetry indulge the same affinities and a corresponding imagery. Vergil in the Eclogues is a troubadour dressed as a shepherd. Even for Horace love is sometimes a rather pastoral phenomenon. And for the influential Gallus, love elegy must have been very much what it is in the elegies of Tibullus and Propertius. We should, in considering the work of Propertius, release him from close association with Tibullus and align him with the general tradition of love poetry in the last three decades of the first century B.C. If we look at them all—Catullus, Gallus (whose works have perished but whose model and formative influence on the others is strongly perceptible), Propertius, Tibullus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid—we see that they form a group of good poets, contiguous in time like the Elizabethans, Metaphysicals, or Romantics of English literary history. They are working to apply and to form a standard sensibility. The result is that the poetry of individual feeling and direct self-expression finds in the words of these artists its most graceful, civilized and subtly modulated Latin cadence.

It is an interesting and decisive development, to which each artist contributes his array of talent and self-conscious energy. The successive poets are conscious of their predecessor's achievements and feel indebted to them; they often hark back to Callimachus or, in general, to the Hellenistic tradition of erudite poetry which he symbolizes. Catullus is epigrammatic and mythological by turns, and most authentically conjures up the "new style" of the doctus poeta that all these poets were to explore; his verses ring with the crystal tone of himself, the delighted, capable, suffering artist. Ovid, at the farther end of the sequence, artfully disguises himself in more refined verses, or more conventionally sighs with a sonnet to his mistress' eyebrow. Propertius, midway in the tradition, throbs at being excluded from his mistress' boudoir.

The term "elegy" is elusive. As early as the time of Minnermus (ca. 630 B.C.), it was the metrical form for love poetry, providing the couplet frame of the long dactylic hexameter and the accompanying slightly shorter pentameter line, and five centuries later Propertius abides by this precedent:

plus in amore valet Mimnermi versus Homero:
    carmina mansuetus levis quaerit Amor.

"Far more than Homer avails Mimnermus in the realm of love. Smooth are the songs that peaceful love demands." (I. ix, 11-12)

The elegiac meter was also used for martial verse, for dirge and lamentation (the meaning most commonly associated with "elegy" in the modern tradition), and for occasional poetry of a descriptive or topical sort. Horace in the Ars Poetica declares that the origins of elegy canot be clearly traced, but in the Epistle To Florus he cheerfully assigns to Propertius the role of distinctive elegist in the tradition of Mimnermus. And from the work of the Latin elegiac poets, we can see that elegy as a poetic form provided a vehicle for self-expression, more unguarded than the stately and intricate measures canonically employed by the authentic "lyric poets" (Alcaeus, Sappho, Pindar, Horace). Latin elegy is more like Romantic love poetry than the usual array of ancient lyric poetry is, and offers the artist a chance to break into an expression of individual feeling without abandoning the shape and structure of a definite form and a recognizable standard style. Like the development and articulation of Roman satire as a literary form, elegy became in Roman hands more capable of channeling and distributing materials from the reservoirs of artistic impulses than it had been in Greek literature. Catullus experimented with Latin elegy in this new direction; Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid expanded and extended elegy to the point where it could virtually serve as a new form, reshaped from its ancient model, and have a future as well as a past.

Significant repercussions of Propertius' success make themselves heard in the lines of two utterly different later poets, Goethe and Ezra Pound. Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius, written in 1917, consists of a group of twelve defiant lyric poems in free verse, "imitations" of the Roman elegist's work, which incorporate themes, subject and whole sections of Propertius transmuted into modern vocabulary and imagery. Through the twelve phases of his homage, Pound vociferously reflects the tone of the "new poet" style, lithely and dramatically vaulting the centuries to find in Propertius the model innovator in an opportune tradition. Pound's translation harps consistently on the individual string:

Shades of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of
 Philetas
It is in your grove I would walk,
I who come first from the clear font
Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy,
            and the dance into Italy.
Who hath taught you so subtle a measure,
            in what hall have you heard it;
What foot beat out your time-bar,
            what water has mellowed your
  whistles?

Out-weariers of Apollo will, as we know,

continue
         their Martian generalities,
         We have kept our erasers in
order.

A new-fangled chariot follows the flower-hung
 horses;
A young Muse with young loves clustered
 about her
            ascends with me into the aether, …
And there is no high-road to the Muses.*

In another version from Homage, Pound recreates the celebrated poem wherein Propertius had referred to Vergil's work-in-progress on the Aeneid:

nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade

Propertius' artistic preoccupations, as he considers the career of Vergil and casts over in his mind the problems of the epic style and pastoral conventions, and is driven back to himself and his addiction to Cynthia; all these personal matters; the insignificant but unforgettable "facts" of Propertius' individual experience—are well registered in Pound's version:

Upon the Actian marshes Virgil is Phoebus'
 chief of police,
          He can tabulate Caesar's great
  ships.
He thrills to Ilian arms,
          He shakes the Trojan weapons of
   Aeneas,
And casts stores on Lavinian beaches.
Make way, ye Roman authors,
          clear the street, 0 ye Greeks,
For a much larger Iliad is in the course of
  construction
(and to Imperial order)
Clear the streets, 0 ye Greeks!
And you also follow him "neath Phrygian pine
 shade:
          Thyrsis and Daphnis upon
   whittled reeds,
And how ten sins1 can corrupt youig maidens;
          Kids for a bribe and pressed
  udders,
Happy selling poor loves for cheap apples.

Tityrus might have sung the same vixen;
          Corydon tempted Alexis,
Head farmers2 do likewise, and lying weary
 amid
          their oats
They get praise from tolerant Hamadryads."

Go on, to Ascraeus' prescription, the ancient,
          respected, Wordsworthian:

"A flat field for rushes, grapes grow on the
 slope."

And behold me, small fortune left in my
 house.
Me, who had no general for a grandfather!
I shall triumph among young ladies of
  indeterminate character,
My talent acclaimed in their banquets,
          I shall be honoured with
   yesterday's wreaths.
And the god strikes to the marrow.

          Like a trained and performing
  tortoise,
I would make verse in your fashion, if she
  should command it,
With her husband asking a remission of
 sentence,
          And even this infamy would not
  attract
          numerous readers
Were there an erudite or violent passion,
For the nobleness of the populace brooks
 nothing
          below its own altitude.
One must have resonance, resonance and
 sonority
          … like a goose.

Varro sang Jason's expedition,
          Varro, of his great passion
   Leucadia,
There is song in the parchment; Catullus the
 highly indecorous,
Of Lesbia, known above Helen;
And in the dyed pages of Calvus,
          Calvus mouming Quintilia,
And but now Gallus had sung of Lycoris.
          Fair, fairest, Lycoris—
The waters of Styx poured over the wound:
And now Propertius of Cynthia, taking his
 stand among these.

The effusive word-ritual Pound enacts in this collection of twelve poems "from" Propertius (including the mistakes³) is like a Byzantine mosaic, sharply and chromatically reflecting the holy wisdom of love's message: spiritual energy is an individual, unique attribute. The poems in twelve different apostolic attitudes illuminate, sometimes with an incandescent glow, sometimes in a harsh and glaring light, but better than criticism can, both how Propertius' elegies came to be and what they brought into being.⁴

Another poetic commentator is Goethe, glad to acknowledge and appropriate the influence of Propertius on his own lyric muse:

Is it a crime that I was so enthusiastic about Propertius? And that the roguish Martial also joined forces with me? That I did not just leave the ancients behind to stand guard over the school-house? That they came back to life and willingly followed me from Latium?
Hermann und Dorothea, lines 1-4

More formal evidence of the elegiac spirit can be drawn from the Roman Elegies V:⁵

Happy am I now on classical soil,
  enthusiastic;
Past and present speak to me louder and more
  charmingly;
Here I follow the advice and peruse the works
 of the ancients
With busy hand daily, and with new
 enjoyment.
But during the nights, Amor keeps me
 otherwise engaged,
And even though I'm taught only half as
 much, I'm doubly gratified.
Am I not learning, by keeping watch over her
 bosom,
Allowing my hand to stray down along her
 side?
Then do I understand marble better, for I
 think and compare,
See with a feeling eye and feel with a seeing
 hand.
If I'm robbed of a few hours of day by my
   beloved,
I'm rewarded with hours of the night to make
  up for it.
We don't just kiss constantly; we have some
 sensible talk,
And when sleep overcomes her, I lie awake
 wrapped in thought.
Many times I've even composed poems while
 lying in her arms,
Tapping out the meter of the hexameter
 quietly with my fingers
On her bare back. She breathes, lovely, and
 asleep,
And her breath penetrates my breast deep.
Amor keeps the lamps burning, in the
 meantime,
And thinks back over the times when he has
 performed
The very same services for the triumvirates of
 old.

Goethe's ardent research in Rome shows him to be well qualified for the seminar in elegy. The lines wherein he describes himself tapping out the accents of his own future hexameters (his verses are composed in the elegiac meter) on his mistress' flesh constitute a memorable example of new doctrine, romantic fullness of feeling within the limits of classical form. Love and art in such circumstances go hand in hand. One could point to several passages in Propertius where Goethe's scene is pre-ordained in larger essence and with a more pagan candor—the fifteenth elegy of Book II, for example:

No man more blest! 0 night, not dark for me,
beloved bed, scene of such dear delight!
To lie and talk there in the lamp's soft
 flickering,
and then to learn ourselves by touch, not
 sight—
to have her hold me with her breasts
  uncovered,
or, slipping on her tunic, balk my hand;
to have her kiss my eyes awake and murmur,
Why must you sleep? and make her sweet
 demand.
Shifting our arms, moving to new embraces,
we kissed a thousand kisses multiplied;
then, with the lamp re-kindled, fed our senses
on new delights—the eye is love's best guide.
For Paris himself, they say, seeing Helen
 naked
on Menelaus' bed, loved at first sight;
Endymion, naked, roused the cold Diana,
naked to lie with her throughout the night.
Put on your tunic if you will, my Cynthia;
these furious hands will rip it into shreds.
11. i-xvi, translated by Constance Carrier

Evocative of the art of painting, these lines are embossed with the patina of visual reality, but they shimmer with suggestion. Propertius has an Endymion complex and wants to succumb to the lure of the Moon (Cynthia—the sister of Apollo). His mundane love will be bathed in a supernal light. Sleep is an ambivalent force for the artist, who must somehow arouse his impulses and expose them to view, and Propertius likes to write of seeing Cynthia asleep. When in the third elegy of Book I he compares her as she sleeps to Ariadne, to Andromeda, and to a maenad in three successive couplets, he envisages the female attitudes of (1) abandonment, (2) blissful rest, (3) the coiled spring:

Like Ariadne lying on the shore
from which the ship of Theseus sailed away,
or like Andromeda, freed from the rock,
who at long last in softer slumber lay,
or like a Maenad, dizzy with the dance,
flinging herself beside the river-bed,
so did my Cynthia seem the soul of rest,
her slender hands beneath her sleeping head,
So did she seem when I came reeling home,
drunk and disheveled, and the dying light
of the slaves' torches lit the dying night.
11. i-x, translated by Constance Carrier

In such passages, the kind of nuclear bits and pieces that may have triggered Goethe's "enthusiasm," Propertius does not merely look at his beloved as would a thirsty lover slaking his curiosity. He sees her as a painter would, and in fact "poses" her, and can drape his figure with the flowing textures of mythology:

si quis vult fama tabulas anteire vetustas
  hic dominam exemplo ponat in arte meam:
sive illam Hesperiis, sive illam ostendet Eois
  uret et Eoos, uret et Hesperios.

Would you surpass the work of ancient
 artists?
Paint only her: your fame will reach the skies.
The sight of her would set the East to flaming
and in the West make equal fires arise.
11. iii, translated by Constance Carrier

(Perhaps he intends Cynthia to be the first authentically pre-Raphaelite Madonna.)

Like the alternating lines of the elegiac couplet, Propertius' assets and liabilities hold his life in balance. Horace and Vergil, in dire straits, fell into the protective hands of Maecenas and Augustus and rapidly became official poets on tenure. Tibullus was wealthy. As a Roman knight in reduced circumstances, Propertius possessed the margin needed for survival, but he too, after the success of his first book of elegies, enjoyed the benefits of Maecenas' patronage. Almost at the outset, however, he learned what he could do best and consistently refused to step beyond that. Whereas we never quite believe Vergil and Horace when they disclaim lofty ambitions and remark ruefully upon the limitations of their artistic vision and prowess, we consent when Propertius describes the modest sphere of his work. We feel, furthermore, that he expects us to agree with him, just as much as we feel that Vergil and Horace are half-listening for polite murmurs of protest from their audience when they bring up the subject. Propertius was not a great poet: Apollo kept reminding him of that fact and he came to accept it. He was a love poet, riveted to his task by one deeply revealing personal experience, and trained by the exercise of his intellectual curiosity and his esthetic intuition in ways of serving his kind of muse faithfully. He was a good poet—perhaps a more steady and satisfying existence than being a great one—and turned out poems like vases, all alike and impressed with the same authentic style of their maker, yet all different and distinct and handmade. This narrowness of scope is a liability, but it is also an instructive fact of experience for Propertius. His literary knowledge, his education in poetry and speech, is an asset in counter-balance, and its immediately apparent dividend is the deft and versatile use Propertius can make of mythology.

The desire to write, and the Greek example of the crafty and sophisticated Callimachus, invited Propertius to invest and not squander his own talent. Association with the rising generation of literary friends, rivals and acquaintances, was stimulating and provocative for a young poet. Latin itself was coming to the gold standard. A patron like Maecenas, or a statesman like Augustus, augured well for the patriotic native artist. Unpredictable liabilities included: the poet's own precocity; his precipitation into maturity by virtue of the brazen, transcendental love affair with Hostia, whom he was prevented by law from marrying; the concentration of his artistic power in one style; and the restriction of his expression to one principal theme, the course of love in triumph and defeat. But we can hardly fail to say, when we read through the results, that Propertius balanced his experience against his art very winningly, with a mature grasp of the meanings he wished to convey, and a sure touch for defining his objects and imparting to them original grace and color.

Of the four books of elegies Propertius wrote between the ages of twenty and thirty-four, the first is dominantly Cynthia's,⁶ the second hers to a large extent. In Book III many other subjects enter so vigorously as to constitute a redirection of his art. Book IV, with its program poem and four others showing the design for verse narratives dealing with Rome's legendary past and ritual customs, its occasional poem on Actium, the felicitous letter of Arethusa to Lycotas,⁷ and the glorious solemn eulogy of Cornelia, the deceased wife of Paullus Aemillus Lepidus, which closes the collection, shows Propertius in yet another dimension of his art. Even the two Cynthia poems in this book, the haunting vision of her reappearance to him immediately after her funeral, the gleeful vision of her catching him dallying in inferior company and browbeating him into submission, and the invective poem hurled at the bawd, are in a new vein.

It is clear that as Propertius' art and life progressed he found much more to interest him than the "sole book of Cynthia" had at first indicated. He had fallen in love and learned to chart the course of this spiritual fever, but he had survived the crisis and ended by falling out of love. He learned to judge the experience sensibly and objectively, when it turned out to be not all there was to his life and art. Attraction, conquest, submission, quarrels, reconciliations, the intoxicating loss of identity, and the sobering rediscovery of self, taught him that love was weightless, baffling and shifting in its thermal currents:

Quicumque ille fuit, puerum qui pinxit
 Amorem,
  nonne putas miras hunc habuisse manus?
is primum vidit sine sensu vivere amantes,
  et levibus curis magna perire bona.
idem non frustra ventosas addidit alas,
  fecit et humano corde volare deum:
scilicet altema quoniam iactamur in unda,

nostraque non ullis permanet aura locis.

Whoever first portrayed Love as a boy—
would you not judge his skill beyond
 compare?
He saw the lack of wisdom in Love's life,
the bounty lost because of fretting care,
and with good reason gave Love windy wings
and made him flutter in the hearts of men—
the winds of chance toss men on shifting seas
and swing them hence and swing them back
 again.
11. xii, translated by Constance Carrier

And as for the rest of his being, why should he not ply his hand and train his eye on the world and its array of other subjects, corresponding to his domina as an Apollo to a twin, one Cynthian to Another?

tale facis carmen docta testudine quale.
 Cynthius impositis temperat articulis.

your fingers8 on the lyre might be Apollo's;
mortal, your music equals the divine.
11. xxxiv, translated by Constance Carrier

A list of the different subjects in Book III alone indicates the variety and range of Propertius' many interests and many choices for composition; the variations away from as well as upon the Cynthia theme in the earlier books are skillful and many. His friends—Tullus, Ponticus, Paetus, Gallus—his sophisticated Rome and its leading literary and political lights, and the mellow, well-defined, enticing Italian landscape, are ingredients for his poems. Larger things can absorb him: death, water, sunlight, nudity, the moon, conjugal steadiness, and Bohemian bachelorhood with its artistic freedom and anxiety. As he writes, Propertius gains a masterly perspective on himself and learns to see what life offers. He is good-humored and resilient, and can redeem his losses by taking stock of what the scene of life can still show him in the way of attractive episodes. Life like art is sometimes to be endured, but it is always distinct and real enough to be thoroughly enjoyed.

Constance Carrier's verse translation makes available for the first time in English poetry the entire result of Propertius' pen. Miss Carrier's choice of alternating rhymes, of exact frames and their deft joining—which one immediately realizes to be her principles of translation in this demanding and delightful poetic recreation—will remind the reader unobtrusively of Propertius' original achievement in the elegiac style. Her work leads directly, with grace, candor, dignity, and realism, into the world of the once unknown poet from Umbria whose art gave him the power to live on.

Notes

^* This and the following quotations are from Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions; copyright 1926, 1954 by Ezra Pound). Quoted by permission of New Directions.

¹ "Ten sins" should be "ten apples" (Propertius II. xxxiv).

² "head farmers do likewise" gives a plus-que-Propertian twist to agricolae domini carpere delicias (Propertius II. xxxiv).

³ For Propertius III. iii—"Thou shalt sing of garlanded lovers watching before another's threshold and the tokens of drunken flight through the night"—

quippe coronatos alienum ad limen amantes
noctumaeque canes ebria signa fugae—

Pound writes with misappropriation:

Obviously crownet lovers at unknown doors,
Night dogs, the marks of a drunken scurry …

⁴ It must be noted, in deference to another critical opinion, that Gilbert Highet has denounced Pound ferociously. He calls the Homage "an insult both to poetry and to scholarship, and to common sense." See Horizon, III (January, 1961), 1: 118.

⁵ These poems were written in 1788 and first known as Erotica Romana; in 1806 they were published in the collected works of Goethe as Roman Elegies.

⁶Monobyblos Properti—Cynthia, facundi carmen iuvenale Properti, accepit famam; non minus ipsa dedit. (Propertius in a Single Volume—Cynthia, the theme of eloquent Propertius' youthful song, won from him fame; no less she herself bestowed.) This citation is from the Epigrams of Martial.

⁷ … which may have first suggested the epistolary form to Ovid, as the poems on Roman rites and the legends connected with them may have suggested the subject of the Fasti." W. Y. Sellar, The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, I (Oxford, 1891), p. 303.

⁸ The reference is to Vergil.