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

hands) favoured by Morris but updated it through the ‗Bodley Head‘ modernizing
aesthetic of John Rodker.
Cunard‘s printing differed from Bird‘s and Rodker‘s then: solely in black ink
(save the embossed red cover-title), it featured illuminated initials and designs by
Pound‘s wife Dorothy made out in a Vorticist style. This marked her Cantos as a book
that deliberately aimed to complicate the established codes Pound used in his
commitment to Morris‘s aesthetics. A Draft of XXX Cantos retains and extends Pound‘s
material allusion to socialism by staging a confrontation between the growing
commodification of print (the Arts and Crafts aesthetic had been exhausted by Virginia
Woolf and the Bloomsbury group by 1930) and the craft tradition evidenced by
Dorothy‘s vorticist initials. Morris‘s rusticism is also evoked in a simplified form by the
choice of a heavy sack-cloth cover (which is deftly subverted by the neat vorticist initials
and simple black typeface). The allusion to the medievalizing Morris and the
modernizing Bodley Head of Lane and Matthews, worked out in prior editions of the
Cantos, is thus carefully rethought in Cunard‘s printing. What makes hers of particular
interest is its implicit critique of what we believe constitutes the difference between craft
and industrial production. By simplifying the Kelmscott tradition to a choice in cover
fabric Cunard consciously frames the industrial aesthetic implied by vorticism. Ironically,
the hand-carved initials retain all that was most ―social‖ in the printing house: the
collaboration between designers like Dorothy and craftsmen like the unknown carver
who created the blocks from her drawings.
If case studies of the political codes that are insinuated through material allusions
like Bornstein‘s, or, perhaps, even my own reading of A Draft of XXX Cantos, overstate
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