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

E gradment li antichi cavaler romanj
and greatly the ancient knights roman
Davano fed a quisti annuttii
gave faith to these annunciations
Malatesta‘s role here as warlord-diviner who can read the hidden meaning of an
eagle‘s landing, and the authority his interpretive skills give him over his troops (arrayed
before the battle between the Malatestine Ferrarese and the Imperial Roman armies at
Nidastore, 1461, whom Malatesta would lead to victory), stands at the centre of Rainey‘s
assertion that modernist difficulty, as Pound deployed it, is designed to frame irrational
leaps of faith – like that made by Rimini‘s fascist ―boss‖ in his zealous assistance to
Pound‘s quest – masquerading as the authority rendered by experience. The ―natural‖
authority of Malatesta‘s augury is used to paper-over his venal lust for power and
authority. Rainey takes great consideration to show that it is the hermeneutics of ―faith‖
that Pound mentions which allow him to craft difficult poetry and bully librarians: ―it is
faith that the Romans once gave to such annunciations, and faith that Sigismondo now
demands of his men‖ (112). In this way, Rainey‘s reading of a small portion of ―Canto
X‖ for its connection to the real-world of Italian fascism is ultimately overreached by the
actual evidence in Pound‘s work against such a contrite diminishment. It is to that
evidence, in ―Canto XXX,‖ that I would like to turn my attention.
―Canto XXX‖ makes us see that Pound‘s attention to the materiality of cultural
production both during the Italian Renaissance and at the time of his own writing is just
as significant to the way he approaches Malatesta as his finding in him a proto-fascist
hero. Funnily enough, the manner by which we might recover this lost narrative was
authored by Rainey himself at an earlier moment in his career. Rainey was once
concerned to show how Pound firmly established himself as an avant-garde poet through
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