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

which to describe the force of nature at work in historical time. That a name can interpret
a title to reveal that what that title holds away from view is the possibility that events are
determined not so much by consequential behavior as by the force of fate. That is,
according to antiquarianists like Pound and Benjamin, natural history is not so much the
production of a critique of taboo, as it is a belief that history is occluded by false
assumptions about how its telling unfolds when it ignores history‟s oblique origins in
nature, persisting in a complex reconsideration of the cipher that that abandoned
teleology remainders to modernist quandary – fate.
Theodor W. Adorno maintained these concerns. Unlike Benjamin, Adorno did not
view fate as a natural and universal problem. Unlike Pound, Adorno did not locate in the
play and contest with personality the disposition towards the real that allowed fate to be
articulated. Adorno finds fate to be intangible, ephemeral, and transitory. It is the
consequence of our focusing too narrowly on Adorno that has led to the misreading of
what modernists could variously mean by these terms and those strategies of de-
personalization that Benjamin tacitly began to theorize through the figures of the
Allegorist and the Collector. These figures illuminate Pound‟s complicated antiquarianist
response to the problem of anachronism in poetic narratives, as he frugally defends the
right of the exogenetic detail to show its provenance over and against its organic
emplotment while also recovering and foregrounding a classic mode of reading that
serves to secure a forgotten endogenetic pattern of elegiac reception, made possible by
the complex ironies he discovers and critiques through the Ovidian half-line that he uses
for a title to the volume of poems in which “Three Cantos” and “Homage to Sextus
Propertius” appear. That his later poetry would continue to plumb the resources of
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