HOMAGE TO PROPERTIUS.—Mr. Ezra Pound’s _Homage to Propertius_ has drawn an American Professor of Latin into the pages of the American magazine _Poetry_. Professor Hales is indignant at the attempt of Mr. Pound to make Propertius intelligible as well as merely accessible to the modern 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 Hales’s literal criticisms it is impossible 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 Hales, 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, as one who habitually lived it, that he wrote of love and of his own adventures, are quite sufficient to prove that he was a child of his age; and if his age was, as it undoubtedly was, decadent, in a professorial sense, Propertius, we may be sure, shared its decadence. I am not saying, it will be observed, nor, I think, would Mr. Pound say, that to have shared in decadence and to be sympathetic to it are the same thing as to be decadent in oneself. What, in fact, distinguishes Propertius is his æsthetic reaction against decadence, against the very decadence in which he had been brought up, and with which he had sympathised. But this is not to admit that “no hint of certain decadent meanings” is to be found in him. On the contrary, he could not very well have become the æsthetic reaction against decadence without importing into his verse more than a hint of certain decadent meanings.