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

narrative that affirms Benjamin‟s theory of the process whereby natural history is induced
into speaking for itself. De-personalizing his poetry, as he did in the Ur-Cantos, Pound
was able to reveal different aspects of that natural history that had been occluded by the
title-making function that can be created in states of authorial anxiety. The Ur-Cantos pay
attention to the way the title that organizes them, Quia Pauper Amavi, could allow them
to gain a foothold in a poetic process that reveals the de-personalized prerequisite
necessary to making natural history productive. It is in the Ur-Cantos that Pound perfects
this technique through working out his anxiety over authorial interruption and the
problem of anachronism by way of a staged argument over poetic rhetoric and narrative
in Robert Browning‟s Sordello.
At stake, then, in asserting such, is the common critical belief (intensified by
Diptych's inclusion of the third early Poundian experiment in de-personalized poetry,
“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”) that the Cantos, and their immediate precursors, offer their
readers complaint against the facile attempts of modern governments to administer the
real, a militarized economy, the louche interests of a mass public fascinated by
consumerist kitsch, an anemic London avant-garde, etc. Undeniably, they do complain,
but only as a cedilla upon Pound's supervening commitment to a particular kind of
criticism that celebrates antiquarianism as the anarchic terrain that we observe as being at
stake in Benjaminian natural history. In this, Pound‟s work provides a superlative
example of the way in which modernist expression can be positively used to critique and
overcome taboo‟s possessiveness. That possessiveness, in the Ur-Cantos, is a question
primarily of narrative form. Pound‟s ability to de-personalize his poetry requires this first
important formal step over his predecessor, Browning, in the modernizing of the long
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