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

connection to the institutions that published her or his work we surrender ourselves to
idle speculations – in this case, speculations about the writer‘s motivation to write
―meaningless‖ work, or about an audience‘s strange desire to read it. Rainey argues that
if we do not pay attention to the immanent materials by which a poet can be seen
constructing their work we have only the option of speculation left to us. He argues that
only when we pay attention to the materials of an author‘s moment in historical time –
how, when and why a poet created a work – are we able to make grounded and
reasonable challenges to the private meanings that are said to emerge in the closed
interpretive conditions modernist difficulty putatively invites. For Rainey, the institutions
of a text‘s material transmission demonstrate the real significance of the high modernist
landmark publications – Ulysses, The Waste Land, Helen in Egypt, and The Cantos.
Because his focus on the material transmission of texts tends to interrupt immanent
readings with questions about authorship and contexts of publication, Rainey‘s work asks
that we take greater account of the personal stories that frame the difficult works of
modernism. Strange then that the nascent valuation of the labour and socialité that book-
making commands leads him to overlook Cunard (nearly) altogether in Monument of
Culture; stranger yet is that her influence on Pound‘s expectations for travelling to
Rimini is nowhere mentioned in Institutions. This inconsistency leaves open the question
as to just what does count as an important element in a bibliographically inspired
biography. What counts as an authentic institutional relationship within modernist
publication history?
Arguments like Rainey‘s and Bornstein‘s attempt to answer this question in one
of two ways: either they situate the meaning of Pound‘s work in history by looking to his
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