"Nobly his hands fold together in his repose. / He is proud of me, believing / I have done strong things among men and become a man / Of place among men of place in the large cities." (James Wright). It sounds like Wright is writing as if translating from another language. Thus he writes stiffly, unidiomatically, since that is what translators tended to do at the time he was writing. "Men of place" is plausibly the literal translation of some idiomatic expression in some other, unidentified language. In American English we say "big cities," not "large cities."

Translation theory would have us believe that this is a good thing, to allow one language to work its magic upon another. But here Wright sounds like a contemporary of Tennyson, but without Tennyson's prosodic skill. Venuti defends Pound's archaisms. I demur.

I'd love to read contemporary Occitan poetry, if it exists. What would be their relation to the Troubadours, to Pound? Do they still write sestinas?