Early Writings

by Ezra Pound

  1 Callimachus ... Philetas: Callimachus (c. 305-240 B.C.E.) was a Greek elegiac poet from Cyrene, also a grammarian and cataloguer at the Alexandrian Library. He was best known for his poem “Dremas” and various epigrams and love lyrics. Philetas (c. 330-275 B.C.E.) was a Greek poet and grammarian from the island of Cos in the Sporados; his work became a source for Latin love poetry.

  2 We have kept: The Latin original reads “Exactus termi pumic versus eat, ” translated literally as “Let the verse glide, polished by the sharp pumice stone.”

  3 Simois: A tributary of the Scamander River, which rises against Achilles in The Iliad in book XXI.

  4 Hector: Son of Priam, king of Troy, and Trojan commander. Killed by Achilles in battle, tied to a chariot by his heels and dragged through the dust (Iliad, book XXII).

  5 Polydmantus ... Deiphoibos: Polydamas, son of Panthoos, was a Trojan officer and adviser to Hector. Helenus and Deiphoibos were sons of Priam and Hecuba. After the death of Paris in the Trojan War, Helenus pursued Helen, who rejected him in favor of Deiphoibos.

  6 Paris: Son of Priam. His abduction of Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon, was the cause of the Trojan War.

  7 Ilion . . . Troad: The Roman Ilium (Greek, “Ilion,” i.e., Troy) was the capital of the district called Troad (Greek, “Troias”).

  8 Oetian gods: Mount Oeta in central Greece was the legendary site of the death of Hercules as a mortal.

  9 Phoebus in Lycia: Phoebus (Greek, “bright”) was a name for Apollo, the god of light, whose cult in Greece probably originated in Lycia, an ancient coastal district of southwest Asia Minor.

  10 devirginated young ladies: The original Latin, “Gaudeat in solito tacta puella sono” (“Let my girl be touched by the sound of a familiar music and rejoice in it”), contradicts Pound’s rendering. W. G. Hale found Pound’s reading of “tacta puella” (“peculiarly unpleasant”) without basis in the Latin. Pound apparently read “tacta” as the opposite of “intacta” (“untouched,” “virgin”). This is perhaps the most controversial line in the poem, although recent critics like Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era and J. P. Sullivan in Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius support the ambiguous reading of Pound.

  11 Cithaeron shook up the rocks: In legend, Amphio enchanted the stones from Mount Cithaeron to form the walls of Thebes, the capital of Boeotia.

  12 Polyphemus?: The cyclops blinded by Odysseus (Odyssey, book IX).

  13 Taenarian columns: Columns made of black marble from Taenarus, Sparta.

  14 Marcian vintage: Water from the Marcian aqueduct that fed the grottoes, pools, and fountains of wealthy Romans.

  15 Numa Pompilius: The second king of Rome.

  16 Jove in East Elis: The sacred precinct at Olympia in Elis (modern Ilia) contained a colossal statue of Zeus (i.e., Jove).

  17 Helicon: A mountain range in central Greece and the celebrated home of the Muses.

  18 Bellerophon’s horse: Bellerophon slew the Chimaera with the help of the winged horse Pegasus.

  19 father Ennius: Quintus Ennius (239-169 B.C.E.) was considered to be the father of Latin poetry on the basis of Annales, his epic poem on the history of Rome.

  20 Curian brothers . . . Horatian javelin: The three Curian brothers from Alba Longa fought the three Horatian brothers from Rome. They killed two of the Horace brothers, then were themselves killed by the third, who then set up their javelins at the corner of the basilica in the center of Rome to celebrate the victory.

  21 Q. H. Flaccus: The Latin poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus).

  22 battle at Cannae: Ancient city of Apulia and site of the Roman defeat by Hannibal.

  23 Silenus . . . Tegaean Pan: Silenus, a satyr in Greek mythology known for his drunkenness, prophetic song, and lechery; Tegaean Pan is the Arcadian and Greek fertility god. Tegea was a town in Arcadia.

  24 Cytherean mother: Aphrodite, from her association with the Ionian island of Cythera; her chariot was pulled by doves.

  25 Gorgon’s lake: A lake of blood flowing from Medusa’s neck when Perseus killed her.

  26 thyrsos: The thyrsus was the wand, bound with vines or ivy, carried by Dionysus and his followers during orgiastic rites.

  27 Calliope: Muse of epic poetry, who speaks as if offended by Propertius’s desertion.

  28 Suevi: Germanic forces who crossed the Rhine in 29 B.C.E. but were defeated by the Roman general Gaius Carinas.

  29 Cypris: Aphrodite, commonly thought to have risen from the sea near Paphos in Cyprus, where she was worshipped as a goddess of fertility.

  30 Lygdamus: Propertius’s slave, who had an affair with Propertius’s mistress, Cynthia. Hence the irony of the phrase “constant young lady.”

  31 orfevrerie: An ornament worked in gold.

  32 Pierides!: The Muses, whose reputed home before Helicon was Pieria on the northern slopes of Mount Olympus.

  33 Ossa . . . Pelion: Allusion is to the attempt of the twin giants Otus and Ephiates to climb up to heaven by piling Mount Ossa on Olympus and Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa.

  34 Caesarial ore rotundos: “With round mouth.” Bombast in the official, public style.

  35 Phrygian fathers: Asiatic style of the royal family of Troy.

  36 Acheron: One of the five rivers of Hades.

  37 Marius and Jugurtha together: Caius Marius (157-86 B.C.E.), seven times consul, captured and put to death Jugurtha, the ruler of Numidia, in 104 B.C.E.

  38 the Cytherean: Aphrodite, who with Persephone was a rival for the love of Adonis (see note 24).

  39 Endymion: A handsome shepherd on Mount Latmos loved by the moon goddess Diana, who descended to embrace him every night while he slept.

  40 Juno’s Pelasgian temples: Juno (Greek, Hera) was the female equivalent of Jupiter and the goddess of women. In legend, she was brought up by Temenus, son of Pelasgus in Arcadia. “Pelasgian” denotes all pre-Grecian peoples in the Mediterranean.

  41 Pallas: Pallas Athene was the patron goddess of Athens and Greek cities in general.

  42 Io . . . Callisto: Io was turned into a heifer by Zeus and persecuted by the jealous Hera. Ino was the second wife of the king of Themes, Athamus. Driven insane by Hera, she jumped into the sea and was transformed into the sea goddess Leucothea. Andromeda was offered to a sea serpent because her mother, Cassiopeia, had offended the Nereids (sea maidens) by boasting of her beauty. Perseus was the slayer of Medusa, who changed the monster into stone and married Andromeda. Callisto was the mother by Zeus of Arcas, the legendary ancestor of the Arcadians. Hera changed Callisto into a bear, who was almost killed by Arcas when hunting. Zeus intervened and changed Callisto and Arcas into the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

  43 Semele: Consumed by Zeus’s lightning in the conception of Dionysus.

  44 beauties of Maeonia: The beautiful women in Homer whose reputed birthplace was in Maeonia, ancient name of Lydia in Asia Minor.

  45 rhombs: Noisy rhombus wheel of part IV of the poem.

  46 Avernus: A lake in Campania, near Naples. The name is used to refer to the underworld, partly because Aeneas descended to the underworld in a nearby cavern.

  47 Persephone and Dis: Persephone was carried off by Pluto while picking flowers in the meadows of Enna, Sicily. She ruled as queen of the dead for half the year. “Dis” is the Roman corruption of the Greek, “Pluto,” also called Hades.

  48 Iope ... Campania: lope is Cassiopeia, wife of Ethiopian king Cepheas and mother of Andromeda. Propertius may have used the name for metrical reasons. Tyro: the lover of Poseidon, visited by him in the form of the river Enipeus. Pasiphae, the daughter of the sun, wife of Minos and mother of the Minotaur. Achaia, a name given to separate territories in the north and along the southern shore of Greece. Troad, the district of Troy. Campania is a fertile and wealthy district south of the Roman Latium.

  49 Sidonian night cap: A nightcap from Sidon, Phoenicia, known for its distinctive purple dye.

  50 feathery sandals of Perseus: Hermes lent Perseus wings for hi
s feet as an aid in obtaining the Gorgon’s head.

  51 Cytherean: Another name for Aphrodite, caught by her husband, Hephaestus, in an act of adultery with Ares (Mars). Hephaestus entangled her and Mars in a net and exposed them to the ridicule of the gods. On their release, however, Aphrodite renewed her virginity in the sea (see notes 24 and 38).

  52 Ida: Pound personifies Mount Ida, where Paris was brought up and fell in love with the nymph Oenone.

  53 Hyrcanian: Hyrcania, a region south of the Caspian Sea. Eos: Goddess of the dawn.

  54 Via Sacra: Principal street in Rome that ran past the Temple of Vesta; also the street of prostitutes.

  55 Colchis: The destination of Jason and the Argonauts. Jason returned with Medea, the king’s daughter, but abandoned her for Glauce.

  56 Lynceus: An Argonaut, but here a fictitious name for a minor poet.

  57 Achelöus ... Antimachus: Achelöus was a river god who fought Hercules for the hand of Deianira twice, the second time in the form of a bull; Adrastus was the king of the Argos and leader of the Seven against Thebes. Achenor is the name given to Pheltes, son of the king of Nemea who saw his death as an ill-omen. Propertius has Archemorus, “forerunner of death.” Aeschylus, founder of Greek tragedy, whose works include Seven Against Thebes. Antimachus: Greek writer and poet author of the fifth-century epic Thebaïs.

  58 Actian marshes: Actium was the site of Octavian’s defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra (31 B.C.E.), which marked the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire.

  59 Ilian ... Lavinian beaches: Ilian is Trojan, hence Roman. Aeneas, hero of the Aeneid, is described as founding a Trojan settlement in Latium, which was the origin of Rome. Lavinia is Latium. Lavinia is also the daughter of the king of Latium courted by Aeneas.

  60 Thyrsis and Daphnis: Figures in book VII of Virgil’s Ecologues. Thyrsis is defeated in a singing match presided over by Daphnis.

  61 Tityrus: A sheperd in Virgil’s Ecologues sometimes identified as Virgil himself.

  62 Hamadryads: Tree nymphs.

  63 Ascraeus: Ascra in Boeotia was home of Hesiod, the author of Works and Days, a realistic picture of rustic life.

  64 Varro ... Leucadia: Varro is the Latin poet Publius Terentius Varro. His love poems to Leucadia are lost.

  65 Calvus ... Quintilia: Calvus, orator and poet, whose love poems to his wife or mistress, Quintilia, are lost.

  66 Gallus ... Lycoris: Cornelius Gallus was a friend to Virgil and first prefect of Egypt who wrote four books of love poems, since lost, to the actress Cytheris, called Lycoris in the poems.

  HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY

  Mauberley was first published in an edition of two hundred copies by the Egoist Press (London) in June 1919, without Pound’s name. Or, rather, it had simply the initials “E. P.” after the title and no other indication of an author. This was the first appearance of the poem in print. No American edition of the poem as a separate publication appeared, although The Dial published the first six sections of part I in September 1920 and a slightly revised form of the entire poem appeared in Poems 1918-1921 (1921). The Dial edition omitted the “E. P.” that precedes the title of the first poem, “E. P. Ode Pour L’Election de Son Sepulchre.” The omission was repeated in the poem’s first American appearance, Poems 1918-21. Not until Selected Poems in 1949 were the initials returned.

  Pound said that Mauberley was a popularization of Propertius, the two poems sharing a disdain for conventional but limited literary models. Mauberley, however, is more disillusioned and disenfranchised than Propertius and disturbed by the world around him. In Personae (1926), Pound also added this note: “The sequence is so distinctly a farewell to London that the reader who chooses to regard this as an exclusively American edition may as well omit it and turn at once to [“Homage to Sextus Propertius”].” In that edition, the subtitle reads “(Contacts and Life),” which Pound declared was “the actual order of the subject matter.”

  1 “Vocat... umbram”: “The heat calls us into the shade.”

  2 E. P. Ode Pour L’Election de Son Sepulchre: “Ode for the Selection of His Tomb,” an adaptation of the title of an ode by Pierre de Ronsard.

  3 Capaneus: One of the seven warriors dispatched from Argos to attack Thebes. Boasting that not even a thunderbolt from Zeus could prevent him from scaling the city, Capaneus was struck down by lightning. He appears in Dante’s Inferno, XIV, emblem of defiance.

  4 Ƭδµ∈υ . . . Tρoíη: Odyssey, book XII, from the sirens’ song: “For we know all the toils that are in wide Troy.”

  5 L’an ... eage: “In the thirtieth year of his life,” adapted from the opening of François Villon’s Le Testatment.

  6 Attic grace: A pure classical style associated with Attica, a region forming the southeast part of central Greece. Superseding the Attic dialect was a single, common Greek dialect under the Athenian Empire.

  7 barbitos: Seven-stringed instrument resembling the lyre.

  8 Samothrace: A Greek island, home of the Winged Victory and renowned for its worship of Dionysus. Saint Paul visited the island.

  9 τòκαλóν: “The beautiful.”

  10 Pisistratus: A beneficent Athenian tyrant (605-527 B.C.E.) who encouraged the Dionysian rites, especially in their dramatic form.

  11 τíν . . . θεòν: “What man, what hero, what God,” adapted from Pindar’s Olympian Ode II.1: “What god, what hero, what man shall we loudly praise?”

  12 pro domo: For the home.

  13 pro patria . . . “et decor”: Excised from Horace: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

  14 usury: The practice of lending money at an exorbitant or illegal rate of interest. This is the first poem by Pound to use the word, which would become a key term in his later work, especially The Cantos. Its use coincides with his meeting and studying the Social Credit theories of Major C. H. Douglas, whose Economic Democracy Pound reviewed in April 1920 for the Athenaeum and the Little Review.

  15 Yeux Glauques: Glaucous eyes, a phrase used by Théophile Gautier in his Mademoiselle de Maupin (“L’oeil glauque”) to evoke the dull grayish green or grayish blue gaze common in Pre-Raphaelite portraits of women.

  16 “Kings’ Treasures”: “Of Kings Treasures” was the opening chapter in John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865).

  17 Cophetua: Elizabeth Siddall modeled for Burne-Jones’s Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid (1884).

  18 maquero: Pimp. In context, it may refer to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s infidelities with Fanny Cornforth and perhaps Jane Morris, two of his models and lovers.

  19 “Siena mi fe’: Disfecemi Maremma”: “Siena made me; Maremma undid me.” Dante, Purgatorio, V.

  20 Monsieur Verog: Victor Plarr (1863-1929), a member of the Rhymers’ Club, author of In the Dorian Mood (1896) and librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons. Plarr was born near Strasbourg and came to England after the Franco-Prussian War. Pound mentions him at the end of “Siena Mi Fe’.”

  21 Gallifet: Gaston Gallifet, a French general in the Franco-Prussian War who led a cavalry charge at Sedan.

  22 Dowson: Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), a poet Pound admired for epitomizing a decade (1900-1910). Pound cited Dowson’s poem “Cynara” as an early influence on his work (LE, 367). Rhymers’ Club: Group founded in the early 1890s by Yeats, Ernest Rhys, and T. W. Rolleston. Members included Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Victor Plarr, and Arthur Symons. Pound praised them to Floyd Dell, celebrating their work in “knocking bombast & rhetoric & Victorian syrup out of our verse” (in Ruthven, 136).

  23 Headlam: Reverend Stewart D. Headlam (1847-1924), who resigned his curacy in 1878 after a lecture at a workingman’s club on dancing and the theater. Image: Selwyn Image (1849-1930), artist and poet; member of the Rhymers’ Club and Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford. With Headlam, he founded the Church and Stage Guild. Coedited the Hobby Horse, a periodical that connected the nineties poets with the Pre-Raphaelites. Pound met Image in 1909 and numbe
red him with Olivia and Dorothy Shakespear as one of the most valuable figures he had so far met in London.

  24 Terpsichore: Greek muse of the dance.

  25 Brennbaum: German, “burnt tree,” suggesting “burning bush.”

  26 Horeb: Where Moses made water flow from a rock. Sinai: The mountain where Moses saw the burning bush and was given the Ten Commandments.

  27 Mr. Nixon: Pound said Nixon was “a fictitious name for a real person,” that person most likely the prolific journalist, editor, and novelist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), whom Pound probably met through Ford Madox Ford.

  28 a friend of Blougram’s: Gigadibs, the literary man in Browning’s poem “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” in which the bishop substitutes material for spiritual pleasures.

  29 “Conservatrix of Milésien”: The salacious Milesian Tales did not survive antiquity. Pound adopts the phrase from Rémy de Gourmont’s short story “Stratagèmes” (1894), which Pound later glossed as “Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures” in a postscript to his translation of Gourmont’s Natural Philosophy of Love (1922).

  30 Pierian roses: An allusion to a line from Sappho: “for you have no claim to the Pierian roses,” addressed to a young girl. Pieria in Greece was a reputed home of the Muses.

  31 Lawes: Henry Lawes (1596-1662) set to music “Goe lovely Rose” and other poems by Edmund Waller.

  32 “Vacuos ... morsus”: Epigraph adapted from Ovid, Metamorphosis, VII: “his empty mouth snaps at the air.”

  33 Jacquemart: Jules Jacquemart (1837-1880), a Parisian watercolorist and etcher who engraved the frontispiece of Gautier’s Émaux et Camées (1881).

  34 Messalina: Unfaithful wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, murdered at twenty-four. Her head appeared on coins struck early in Claudius’s reign.