CANTO XLIII

Secret history is at least twofold. One part consists in the secret corruptions, the personal lusts, avarices, etc. that scoundrels keep hidden, another part is the “plus,” the constructive urges, a secretum because it passes unnoticed or because no human effort can force it on public attention. 

Ezra Pound. Guide to Kulchur 264.

Pound has been rendering the fairly heavy prose of his sources into clearly phrased and measured verse for a flexible speaking voice, a voice inflected with humour or irony or enthusiasm, alert to the moral nuances and complexities of the story, but staying always close to the recorded facts and the implicit viewpoints of the time. He is not writing timeless lyric, but working at recovering what was done in that place at that time, and with a keen awareness that one must act in time.

David Moody. Ezra Pound: Poet. Volume II: The Epic Years, 1921-1939. 216.