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

Bornstein, for example, is interested in discerning the politics and aesthetics of the
various print cultures alluded to in each edition of the Cantos‘ bibliographic codes, the
materials of book-making. Where Rainey situates the meaning of Pound‘s work in history
by looking somewhat exclusively to his biography for its explanation, George Bornstein‘s
work situates the meaning of Pound‘s text in history by looking exclusively at the choices
Pound made in directing how his texts were made. Bornstein reads a socialist discourse in
the choices Pound and fine-printers implement in his published texts. Pound‘s early
Cantos reflect in their self-conscious use of particular materials his interest in the Arts-
and-Crafts movement of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press and by extension its
explicitly socialist ethic. When William Bird used red and black ink for the illuminations
and mixed them with a modern Caslon typeface in his printing of A Draft of XVI Cantos
and when John Rodker repeated the process in 1928 with A Draft of the Cantos 17- 27,
Pound was able to create a direct reference to Morris‘s socialism while updating its
aesthetic repertoire to accommodate the changed tastes of a contemporary audience. For
Bornstein these allusions carry an important statement about Pound‘s ethical
commitments:
The effect was to gesture at once backwards and forwards, to
invoke the opposing bibliographical principles of Morris‘s
Kelmscott Press and of Lane and Mathew‘s Bodley Head, of a
medievalizing ideal and a modernizing aesthetic, of craft rather
than industrial production, and through Morris of a set of socialist
principles rarely identified with Pound. (37)
Nancy Cunard was among the publisher-printers who helped Pound deploy these
principles in publications of his work. Her edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos retained the
Caslon typography (an uncial or round letter-form that harkened to ‗medieval‘ scribal
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