and on to a Pound/Ovid. Among an almost inexhaustiblensupply of superlatives—not all of’them equally honorificn—Pound is Ovid’s most significant disciple.nIn an age immortal by virtue of its poets, the AugustannAge of Rome, this Ovid scaled, in the afterglow of Catullus,nHorace, Propertius, and Vergil, the heights of acclaim withnsuch sexual gumdrops as the Amores (Marlowe apprenticednon these), the Heroides (Middle-Englished by GeoffreynChaucer as “Tales of Good Wimmen”), and the RemedianAmoris, a handbook for Lotharios, from which Poundnplaces a swatch at the beginning of his seventh canto:nAnd then the phantom Rome,nmarble narrow for seatsn”Si pulvis nullus” said Ovid,n”Erit, nullum tamen excute.”n(“Should the lady’s lap lack lint, brush it off anyway.”) Atn30, Ovid had become Rome’s best-loved, best-selling poet.nHe would seem to have enjoyed this immensely: He tooknthree wives (successively) and was happy with the last.nAt 50 he was banished. Augustus suddenly condemnednthe fresh and delightful verses of his youth, now twondecades old, as of “immoral tendency.” He was to sail byntrireme into a remote trading post, Tomi, on the BlacknSea—for a Roman this was like being banished to thenmoon!—and stay there. Now nothing is sure about thisncase, except that it was partly personal and that it seems tonhave involved the Emperor’s own daughter (his consortnLivia’s by her previous marriage), a young lady of taste andntendencies which can only be euphemistically described asn”immoral.” She too was banished—her cause “license,”nthe timing suspicious. Ovid mumbles something in one ofnhis five late books of Sorrows about his crime having beennActaeon’s. Use your imagination.nStunned, stung, at first he burnt his manuscripts. Later,nfrom exile, he asked friends to unsequester their draft copiesnof his life’s work, 15 books of epic hexameter comprisingnmyth and history down to the accession of the EmperornAugustus. He hoped that the magnitude and majesty of hisnaccomplishment would (especially in view of the movingnmanifest patriotism of the finish) change the Emperor’snmind. It never did. Augustus died in moral rectitude,nsurrounded by the detestable stepchildren who succeedednhim. Ovid, in exile, died and lived on: Dante, Chaucer,nVillon, Shakespeare, Goethe, Keats, Hugo, virtually everynone has been vitally influenced by the Metamorphoses.nNot dissimilarly, Pound was held at the close of the warnin particularly nasty confinement on charges of giving aidnand comfort to the enemy by speaking, wildly to be sure,nover Rome Radio. Yet reeentiy unearthed correspondencenin the Fascist Archive indicates that the Italian governmentnwas so aided and comforted that it was ready to shoot him asnan Allied spy! (Mussolini’s intervention—“He’s nuts, hendoesn’t grasp Fascism at all, but he’s a true friend to Italy.nLet him alone!”—spared the poet a Fascist firing squad.)nPound was remanded as mentally unfit to stand trial to anfederal hospital for the criminally insane wherein he passedna third of his working life captive (he also spent all of hisncaptive life working), but ultimately was released to go intonmandatory exile through combined efforts of senators,ncongressmen, undersecretaries, plus petitions signed byndistinguished writers. Pound’s response to reporters was:n”Waal, Ovid had it worse!”—Ovid having died at just thenage (60) Pound’s worst began.nOf Ovid’s pervasive apparition in The Cantos of EzranPound, finally abandoned as unfinishable at their 803rdnpage, one can point to at least three aspects: a technical, ansubstantive, and a cosmic, which we might describe asnMask, Money, and Mythos.nThe mask, a literary device in which the narrative voicenof the text itself is clearly not the author’s own but someonenelse’s, became Modernism’s fundamental feature in prosenand verse—Rilke, Yeats, Apollinaire, Eliot all flaunting it,nPound employing it, sole, throughout his first volumenproper, Personae. In origin, Persona refers to Romanntheatrical masks. Pound’s volume accumulated momentumnover time with masks of various troubadours, with “Cathay”n(Marco Polo, again): a medley of Chinese masks; with then”Homage to Sextus Propertius,” an anti-(Roman: but alsonBritish)-imperialist mask that constantly threatens to meldnPropertius into the opprobrious tones of Henry James; andnfinally “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” whose persona is that ofnsome fictitious esthetician-poet of the London of the yearsnof the Great War who undertakes to bury and eulogize thenpseudo-defunctive author, a shifting blend of newspeak,nRonsard, Gautier, Villon, Waller (Edmund, not Fats), andnBion’s Lament for Adonis.nMask-as-such was an artistic strategy Pound simply tooknnnMARCH 1987 / 21n