The Leeds Review - Issue #1
Crispin Wallace Info
"pauper amavi" is Latin, and translates as "a poor man, I have loved". This probably refers to the title of a book of poetry by Ezra Pound: Quia Pauper Amavi (1919).
Catullus (c.85 BC-54 BC) was a Roman poet. His love poems, epigrams, and longer pieces are almost entirely known from a single manuscript dating from the early-fourteenth century (which is now lost).
» Read an article about Catullus' love poems
Rainer Maria Gerhardt (1927-1954) was a German writer, about whom very little has been published (or indeed is known outside German literary scholarship). His work was translated by William Carlos Williams, and he corresponded with the American poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson (the latter included two poems to Gerhardt in his collection The Distances). These links with mid- to late- American modernism provide the initial key to understanding his poetry. Documents such as Olson's poetic manifesto, Projective Verse explain the need for a formal structure based not on traditional stanza forms and scansion, but on strong individual lines that are to be spoken, or at least thought of in such a way; this method is best summed up by Pounds often-quoted dictum: "compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome".