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

his invention of a unique poetic technique. In his first study of Pound‘s Italian
Renaissance, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture, Rainey reminds us that Pound
began to practice a new form of quotation in his Italian cantos that was pointedly
designed to criticize the American reception of the German philological tradition – a
tradition he learned as a Medieval studies graduate student at the University of
Pennsylvania. In quotation, Rainey once located the source of Pound‘s ethical
commitments. Pound, we learn, connected the businesslike rigor of institutional philology
―with habits and practices of capitalist culture in the United States‖ (66).
It was Pound‘s rejection of any ―get-and-spend‖ system, broadly, that drove him
to craft an aesthetic practice that confronted the myths of precision and completion that
he saw undergirding both the contemporary philological practices that wasted intellectual
energy on recovering the meaningless provenance of textual curiosities and the fetishized
commodity exchange system of Western capitalism. ―Pound invokes the standards of
philological accuracy only to savage the institutional apparatus that sustains them. His
literalist translations parody the typical features of the loathed institution,‖ Rainey
continues to write. Rainey offers many examples of Pound using quotation ―creatively‖
in the Malatesta Cantos to subvert the practices of professional philology. He provides
close contextual readings of the lines Pound used from the Provençal poet Raimbaut
Vaquerias, the figure of ―Pan,‖ and fifteenth-century letters transcribed during his ten
months of archival research in various Italian towns and cities.
Pound‘s sensitivity to the resources of quotation rendered new possibilities for
parody and critique within the Malatesta Cantos. My reading of ―Canto XXX‖ allows us
to see the relevance of this neglected tradition of Pound scholarship to parts of his text
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