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

interesting, a rapprochement is necessary in order to confront the conclusions she draws
about poetic-subjectivity and impersonality. This rapprochement extends into a wider
look at the work of Virginia Jackson who shares similar critical pre-dispositions to
Blasing and Cameron in her discussion of lyricism and subjectivity.
Listening closely to the phonemic play in the Cantos for the "lyric" connections
that lie outside their content, Blasing values Pound's poetry for its ideological "fluidity"
but regards it to be the accidental by-product of his intent. Her theories of ―metaleptic‖
subject-formation, caused by the ontological priorness of the "mother-tongue," and the
ensuing protraction of authorial intention to what it is that constitutes the "real" history
that delivers this tongue, allows her to dismiss Pound's avowed intentions to demonstrate
historical repetition and the details that illumine the actual conditions that he may have
thought to be governing cultural production. Here is the conclusion she draws after
reading Canto 71, an Adams Canto:
The prevailing defense of the Cantos is that its epic openness and
polyvocality save the poem from being a totalitarian text, which, in
the standard reading, is aligned with "lyric closure." But we always
only hear other voices as edited by Pound. My argument is that
lyric language, which is "open" to a different history, keeps the
poem ideologically fluid. The text has a kind of negative capability
because it allows language to organize in a fashion that undoes
tendentious messages. To motivate the signifier, the lyric listens to
the words otherwise, and if we listen to words otherwise, we hear a
different Adams - or, more accurately, different Adamses - than the
one he [Pound] would like to leave for the record. (Lyric Poetry
161)
Blasing draws new implications from the timbre of Pound's ―voice,‖ at the
expense of his intent: "[b]ut we always only hear other voices edited by Pound" (162).
Whether this is true or not is beside the point. Pound's version of subjectivity makes the
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