TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

‗persona,‘ an impersonation of an attitude rather than a robust expression of conviction‖
(378). If this is indeed the case, what needs testing is something that appears as an after-
thought to Saunders when he sums up the blended object of Pound‘s narration, the
allobiographical second sequence ―Mauberley‖: ―Yet insofar as its composite portraiture
is of Pound‘s own contacts, it is also imaginary autobiography: fictionalizing Pound‘s
own experience as the experience of a fictional persona‖ (410). This thought, that
authorial subjectivity is the reflection of the experiences of a fictional persona, confronts
the performative and essentialist bias that yet informs contemporary theories of
―impersonality.‖ I favor disbanding the term for its promiscuous emphasis on dramatic
models beholden to an anterior creator for their theoretical heft. The narrative stance that
imagines the narrator, imagining itself writing its own author, reflects Benjamin‘s
understanding of the relationship between the productive context of de-personalization
incorporate to modernist expression and that stance‘s relationship to the processes
Benjamin‘s theory associates with literary language as it confronts the taboo making
functions of titles. This position needs the context provided by recent work on
impersonality and lyric subjectivity to be fairly measured.
Mutlu Blasing's recent reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos, found in Lyric Poetry:
The Pain and Pleasure of Words, is exemplary of the return to essentialist, yet complex,
theories of subjectivity in lyric poetry. Blasing‘s exploration tends to do Pound‘s version
of impersonality, never really a performance, a disservice. To demonstrate what is at
stake in Blasing‘s misreading, I take on the implicit challenge to re-theorize poetic-
subjectivity called for by Sharon Cameron when she says that we have no idea what the
prefix "im" in impersonality means. While Mutlu Blasing's reading of Pound is
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