In Propertius, Ezra Pound found a poet who struggled, through his elegiac love verses, with the essential questions of the survival of poetry. He is the poet who refuses to be analyzed in hymns to Caesar's victories, to adopt the dominant epic poetry, "arma virumque cano," or to identify with it.

Where he seems to yield and praise whatever the Augustan propaganda demands, it is undermined by a well-hidden irony, hypocritical humility, and an insinuating denunciation of the barbarity of Roman triumphs, culminating in mocking his fellow diners in the home of Maecenas, Horace, and Ovid.

In his letter to A.R. Orage in April 1919, Pound writes: "If it were possible, I would wish to outline a more complex character—not just that of Propertius—that expresses the spirit of a young man of the Augustan age who detests rhetoric and is immune to the foolish ideals of the empire."

Propertius offered Pound the literary and cultural background that allowed him to capture the irony and mockery towards his era, which he believes is facing literary and cultural problems similar to those of the Roman Empire during Propertius's time.

He proposes a loose translation of the original poem—the elegy of Propertius for the death of his mistress Cynthia—adding even his own interpolated verses to the work of the Roman poet, creating a poem aimed at contemporary readers, undermining the exact, academically flawless, but tedious translations by scholarly teachers, proclaiming that the translator's duty of classical poetic texts is their renewal, with the aim of moving and enchanting today's audience.