I’ve just spent quite a bit of time—and quite a lot of words—writing about lines 68-69 of Ezra Pound’s Canto I: after sticking to Book 11 of the Odyssey thus far Pound interrupts the poem to write:





"Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus.
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer."

Turns out that—shame on him (yes, I’ve read your ABC of Reading, Ezzie)—Pound has been using Divus’s sixteenth century translation of Homer into Latin instead of the original ancient Greek. How could he live with himself?

It also turns out I was able to write a whole page on just those two lines, and what they do to the poem. I know Ezra was a bad man, and then recanted via psychobabble his fascism in a quite pathetic manner, but, well, I like his poetry. Though these days I like his pronouncements in books like How to Read more. I keep meaning to go to St Elizabeth’s and see where he lived for all those years.

I’m one hundred pages into Daniel Deronda—one eighth of the way through—and Deronda himself appeared only in the first chapter and has since gone away. (There was a hint he may have participated in the action of Chapter 2, but he wasn’t, so to speak, on stage.) In the mean time, Eliot gives us Gwendolen Harleth. She fascinates me—largely because, in spite of her arrogance and almost banal wish to be different, she has the most interesting reaction when she receives an avowal of love:

“Gwendolen herself could not have foreseen that she should feel this way. It was all a sudden, new experience to her. The day before she had been quite aware that her cousin was in love with her—she did not mind how much, so that he said nothing about it; and if any one had asked her why she objected to love-making speeches, she would have said laughingly, ‘Oh, I am tired of them all in the books.’ But now the life of passion had begun negatively in her. She felt passionately averse to this volunteered love.”

Later she is reduced to uncontrollable sobbing—which, yes, is oh so nineteenth century, but also seems right. She cannot bear to be loved. And I suppose a heroine who cannot bear to be loved is not so interesting in the twenty-first century landscape, but in the nineteenth century, I do find it rather striking. Especially as its not (overall) satirical (Eliot does have a wicked tongue—pen—at times) like, for instance Vanity Fair. She certainly has a dose of Becky Sharp in her—but what else is there? See? Eliot’s got me hooked. Jolly old Mary Ann Evans.

(Which reminds me, too, of a letter Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell sent her—praising one of her novels, but rounding off with the sentiment: “But I wish—oh! how I wish—that you were Mrs Lewes.)

(Which, in turn, reminds me that George Henry Lewes wrote a rather scathing bit about the character of Esther in Bleak House.)

(And you don’t want to know where musings on Dickens, Esther and Bleak House could take me.)