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

the meaning of Pound‘s text by conflating choices concerning book production with his
personal politics, then Rainey‘s study of Pound‘s tenure in Rimini in 1922 attempts to
interpret Pound‘s aesthetic techniques by reminding us of his actual responses to the
political changes to which he was exposed. But, as we have seen, Rainey‘s approach is
seriously curtailed by its choice of privileging a thin synchronic moment in Pound‘s
biography through which it attempts to explain all of the complexities inherent in
Pound‘s deployment of the Malatesta ―mask.‖
Rainey ignores Pound‘s anarcho-feminist interests in the reading he exercises
over Pound‘s supposed lapse into abject hero worship. It is important to my argument
that Pound was always also behaving as a socialist poet, inspired by just those ideals to
reference and remember Nancy Cunard‘s effect on The Malatesta Cantos. By recovering
Cunard‘s role in creating A Draft of XXX Cantos we can see how Pound honoured the
anarcho-feminist roots he formed in London, by choosing to publish with small
alternative publishing venues first, and through an active poetic comparison of the
hardships faced by Aldus and the Venetian print milieu to those faced by contemporary
cultural producers, like Nancy Cunard, whom he continued to be in league with years
after leaving London. It is unfortunate that in the process of demonstrating Pound‘s sense
of bourgeois entitlement, Monument makes Nancy Cunard look like Pound‘s anaemic
helpmate.
Cunard knew Pound‘s interests well. She behaved as his researcher for nine
months prior to his arrival in Rimini, locating rare books and transcribing ―wash-lists‖ of
materials he thought might be useful to him. In 1922, as a registrant in the ―Ezuversity,‖
she was doing research for him at that very Gambalunga Library in Rimini that Rainey
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