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

modernist poetry presented in 1930. Broadening our bibliographic sensibility to include
Cunard‘s role in the symbolic and material construction of A Draft of XXX Cantos shows
that Pound directly deploys:
[T]he specific logic of symbolic alchemy that maintains that
investments will not be recouped unless they are (or seem to be)
operating at a loss, in the manner of a gift, which cannot assure
itself of the most precious countergift, ―recognition,‖ unless it sees
itself as without return; and – as with the gift that it converts into
pure generosity by occulting the countergift to come – it is the
interposed time interval which forms a screen and which obscures
the profit promised to the most disinterested investments. (170)
Pound‘s concern to give credit where he finds it due disallows acceptance of the
miracle-making function time gives to those objects it allows the screen of cultural value
to obscure and call ―art.‖ What ―counts‖ as apt, in this materialist mode of criticism, is
how the mode of production that foregrounds the tedium-laced caprices of actual archival
work shapes poetic meaning.
Cunard‘s voice, recorded in this essay‘s title, deserves to be remembered, then,
for how it co-authored Pound‘s Italian Renaissance. While Rainey‘s attention to the role
of the institutions – printers, agents, publishers – that created modernism is spot-on, it
misses the way Cunard‘s involvement in the Malatesta Cantos went far beyond the
‗normal‘ institutional relationship that obtains between poet and printer. Rainey‘s
treatment, like Bornstein‘s, is partial in that he leaves out of the ―symbolic alchemy‖ by
which these Cantos are created, an important element in the story of their material
transmission. Ironically, it is with a story about ‗transmission‘ itself that Pound chose to
end his engagement with the Italian Renaissance and the Malatesta Cantos. By listening
closely to this story we learn how the symbolic alchemy of the production of A Draft of
XXX Cantos speaks to a form of depersonalized production that allows an alternative
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