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

to him is plain: ―News of Nancy? Etc. I keep thinking of the inhabitants of the planet.
Wyndham is back in London. NO. NOT Nancy Cox. But also of her while one is at it./
Mao. Love E. and love to Mother‖ (175).
The use of the Soncinian letter and the ambivalent, if not mean, Venetian print
milieu it refers to, in tandem with the variety of forms of assistance he received from
Nancy Cunard in the construction of the Italian Renaissance Cantos, challenges our sense
of Pound‘s intended aesthetic horizon as that belonging to him as the sole practitioner of
a difficult avant-garde modernism that seeks to obscure meaning in the name of authority.
The wider stance I take towards a text‘s sociology shows the importance of being
sensitive to what Bourdieu‘s critique shows us to be the imaginariness of the separation
of symbolic production and material fabrication. The way art is made into a cult-object
by this separation is utterly deconstructed by the bibliographic codes deployed in
Cunard‘s A Draft of XXX Cantos and in the poetic subjects Pound uses to complete both
his engagement with the Italian Renaissance and this particular volume.
The neat reversal of economic and symbolic capital Bourdieu locates at the centre
of the creation of an avant-garde, rich only with symbolic capital (the more successful a
work is financially the less symbolic value is appointed to it), is echoed by the twin
stories Pound cites in ―Canto XXX‖ about the impoverishing print worlds inhabited by
both Aldus and Cunard. (Cunard, daughter of the shipping magnate Sir Bache Cunard,
lived primarily off of her mother‘s meagre stipend. Her father squandered the family
fortune while she was in her early twenties.) Bourdieu‘s measure of the work done by
time in the creation of symbolic value is mirrored in Pound‘s refusal to celebrate the
passing of a patron in the poetic text and by the inherent difficulties fine-printing of
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