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

where fate – the agent of nature‟s unintentional naming as well as its directionless force
in time – is absconded by the mythical thinking that preserves and enforces title.
The remainder of this introductory chapter explains Benjamin‟s understanding of
the aesthetics and philosophy I associate with the act of concealment that guarantees
taboo‟s possessiveness, and how this privative tendency can be ameliorated and revealed
through attentiveness to the relationship that obtains between names and titles. To
conclude, I unpack the substance that this kind of attention reveals – natural history. The
next four chapters apply a consideration of the aesthetics that this kind of focused
unseating of taboo eventuates through readings of a selection of Ezra Pound‟s poetry,
alongside those critics/theorists who approach Pound‟s poetry with a set of concerns that
can help expose greater implications of his poetic discovery of the relationship that
obtains between names and titles, that which he would come to understand and theorize
as logopoeia, for Benjamin‟s theory of language.
In many ways Pound‟s work has been done a literal disservice. Quite often, our
reading of his work ignores the obvious and careful interest he had in playing with names
and titles. The first two Pound chapters provide a plain-sense reading of the way titles
and names influence one another. These chapters observe the patterns of reflection that
obtain between the title of Pound‟s 1919 volume of poetry, Quia Pauper Amavi, and the
two long poems it collects, the so called Ur-Cantos (“Three Cantos”) and the “Homage to
Sextus Propertius”. The argument of these two chapters is meant to develop a critical
awareness of the way in which these poems exemplify the poetic condition of de-
personalization, that, as we shall shortly see, Benjamin believed to be an intrinsic
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