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

iography and how he can be seen to have responded to political change, or they situate
the meaning of Pound‘s text in history by looking exclusively at its material production.
We wind up with elegant case studies concerning the poetics behind the allusions
encoded in the materials used in the production of his texts; or, trenchant criticisms of
Pound‘s aesthetic work by way of biographical interventions that demonize Pound‘s
practice. By merging these two modes of criticism to show how materialist scholarship,
ideally, allows us to steer clear of the pratfalls of biographical-historicism that pretends to
offer complete unvarnished truth about a poem‘s meaning by pinning down the author‘s
movements, and by avoiding that criticism that wants to "situate" or ―ground‖ the author
"in context" without considering the broader networks and institutions of transmission
and creation we can find a more robust object for critical apprehension. If we choose to
concentrate on Pound‘s practices of quotation, such as his use of Soncino‘s letter in
―Canto XXX,‖ his consistent position as a socialist poet and thinker emerges. (This
ethical position was something that he learned as a habitué of the one-time Fabian
newsletter and cultural-review published in London, The New Age.)
Otherwise, Rainey‘s partial reading of Pound‘s lapse into fascism and of the place
of augury in Pound‘s Malatesta Cantos, buried beneath his seemingly impenetrable
critical apparatus in Institutions and Monument, misses an important aspect of his interest
in Italy, the Venetian print-world, and the economy of friendship and respect he mentions
through deft acts of quotation. Nancy Cunard remembered these motives. She uses a
personal copy of her Cantos to express gratitude to another man of arts and letters,
similarly interested and invested in the pract ice of fine printing: Walter Strachan (see
Figure 1).
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