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

In other treatments of Ezra Pound‘s modernism, a number of tensions and
paradoxes have arisen within attempts to account for the meaning of his difficult lyrics.
For example, what has counted as the legitimate object for materialist apprehension
seems to shift according to each critic‘s belief in the significance of an author‘s politics,
as their modes of institutionalized ―pre-reading‖ come up against poetry that is often
wilfully esoteric. Nowhere are foregone conclusions more apparent than in materialist
readings of Ezra Pound‘s early Cantos. These Cantos have been especially open to
politicized reception as they are understood to focus on the Renaissance warlord-
condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta, and were written at the moment of Mussolini‘s rise to
power. Pound‘s reputation leads critics to see his interest in Malatesta as a logical
symptom of his fascist sympathies rather than, for example, as the outcome of his fervent
admiration for an Italian culture that has historically supported the arts. Mussolini was
only one potential inheritor of this largesse. Thus the problem with common materialist
readings led by Pound‘s reputation is that they tend to avoid the real complexities of
Pound‘s personal politics, evident in the conflicting habits of his being at once a
―causeur‖ – a kind of muckraking provoker – and a poet sensitive to the implications of
textual appropriation. This latter habit, in particular, asks that we understand him as a
socialist cultural producer, while acknowledging that any materialist approach to
modernist aesthetics is going to have to deal with the crucial question of what ―counts‖ as
the ground for materialist criticism.
Lawrence Rainey and George Bornstein have authored the two most important
attempts to read Pound‘s work through reference to material realities. However, in part
because of certain blind spots in their apprehension of the relevant material archive,
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