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

CHAPTER SIX:
THE SUBSTANCE OF ALLEGORY: ―NATURAL HISTORY‖ IN THE WORK OF
WALTER BENJAMIN AND T.W. ADORNO
Ezra Pound, by his own admission, was a literary man whose authorial anxieties
focus not so much on the specific problem of natural history but often enough upon his
own prodigious personality. It was Pound who put Pound himself under taboo. Hence, his
increasing de-personalization and simultaneous recourse into antiquarianism and literary
pseudonyms that masked themselves as forgeries, exponentially charged by the anarchic
proto-feminist insights of collaborators such as Nancy Cunard. Together, Pound’s Quia
Pauper Amavi, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and A Draft of XXX Cantos form a spectacular
enactment of literary crisis where the perceived disparity between the poet‟s authorship
and the poet‟s de-personalization inflict risk, poem by poem, upon the very works he is
producing. It is a moral crisis not unlike the one Pound envisioned for himself at the end
of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in which he proposes a fictionally creative author forging a
biography, one that he himself might have become, but instead chooses to bury. Anxiety
concerning acts of literary recovery and production, his own and his reader‟s, concerned
Pound to the end.
Ezra Pound‟s experiments with de-personalized poetry have provided useful
examples of the way in which naming, either the title of a collection of poems or of the
author‟s identity, demonstrates that rational decision making is not the best criterion by
153