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

dramatic monologue, a feat he would perfect in Quia Pauper Amavi, through the Ur-
Cantos and his homage to Propertius. George Steiner unconsciously quotes Benjamin‟s
discussion of modernist expression in the OGT, mentioned in the first chapter, when he
asserts in his great book on translation, After Babel, that Pound‟s “Propertius” is an
exercise in self-conscious “verbal archaism.” This attempt at modernizing Propertius can
be shown to have begun under the arch of Quia Pauper Amavi, as it initiates Pound‟s
development into a poetic practice that can be profitably read as an attempt to subvert the
power of taboo through its ironic deployment of this title‟s meaning within the body of
the poems that it heads up, and for which it serves to allow the natural history Pound cites
to express itself. Before returning to how the Ur-Cantos deploy the antiquarianist
disposition associated with the figure of the Collector it is necessary to focus on the
theories and reception of Pound‟s work associated with Jerome McGann and
contemporary genetic textual studies. Antiquarianism, the habit of collecting things that
appear disconnected from the present, like messages in a bottle, is the necessary
disposition from which to write a de-personalized poetic narrative.
1
Pound's details, the fragments from past narratives that he either culls from their
sources, or tumbles and refines in the modernist machinery of litotes and restraint, in and
of themselves do not register as invitations for the kind of allegoric interpolation at stake
in Benjamin‟s sense of what it is that is needed to render natural history. Steiner's
impression of Pound‟s archaism seems just. On one level these details are meant to offer
totalities of the perplexing myths that might be used to describe the present, and in this, to
provide a wider cultural matrix from which to describe its variegated articulation. These
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