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

disposition to rendering an aesthetic language that provides a reflective philosophical
critique for taboo forming titles.
These two chapters involve themselves in a conversation with another reader of
Pound and Benjamin, Jerome McGann, who finds that Pound‟s work is determined by its
relationship to its present moment. McGann‟s estimate of Pound finds itself at odds with
the condition of de-personalization that Benjamin theorizes, wherein the past is
celebrated for its being dead and disconnected from the present, a concern of Pound‟s
that these chapters are meant to bring to the fore. In their deployment of the ideas that
Benjamin associates with the twin “antiquarianists” (Collectors and Allegorists) theorized
in the Arcades Project, these poems from Quia Pauper Amavi exemplify themselves as
avatars of de-personalized writing; these chapters demonstrate the way Pound‟s poetic
practice can be fruitfully measured against Benjamin‟s theory of language and its
relationship to fate and taboo. Collectors and Allegorists are exemplary figures in
Benjamin‟s thought. Their mutual interest in the past for its uncanny separation from the
present, in its being for all intents and purposes dead, makes them avatars for the kind of
modernist expression Benjamin theorizes out of his interest in the language he finds in
the baroque German trauerspiel. The fourth chapter concerns itself with demonstrating
what is gained by considering Pound‟s de-personalized poetic practice over contemporary
theories that seek yet to essentialize Pound‟s authorship under the general rubric of
impersonality.
The fifth chapter gives voice to the positive advantages de-personalized writing
affords by showing how the narratological stance of fictional-creativity being solved and
set upon in Quia Pauper Amavi allowed Pound to eventually co-create A Draft of XXX
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