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

spirit that Benjamin describes hiding within Allegorists and Collectors. Pound‘s Ur-
Cantos are, specifically, those that can be said to belong to the spirit of a critical
antiquarian, a person more interested in obeying the strictures of the Collector in his wish
to render the provenance of historical artifacts and poetic objects correctly than in
registering their Allegorical profundity.
A few words about Pound‘s general disposition towards the Ur-Cantos are
necessary. Attention to the surface-level problems surrounding the poem‘s allusiveness
led by an education in Imagist technique that ignores the distinction in Pound‘s thought
between phanopoeia and logopoeia (roughly imagery and irony) does little to illuminate
the implications of the critical-antiquarian stance that is necessary to comprehending the
import of this poem‘s use and engagement with the significance of textual fragments.
Focusing on imagery does little to reveal what is most interesting about Pound‘s text. The
fragments Pound presents are significant, but not simply because of what they mention
and the immediate comment they may make on their historical situation. Rather, it is the
hermeneutic procedure they require of the reader that makes them so beguiling. Pound‘s
fragments provide insight through their moving away from the reader‘s desire to imbue
meaning into their referent. This casting off of attention from the immediate meaning of
the fragment to the tonalities and focalization through which the narrative is revealed in
each fragment‘s emplotment within the poem‘s greater architectonics favors
understanding the textual authority in which that referent had once been situated, sourced,
and cited. Pound, that is, finds means to identify historical affects of textual authority
before they become encoded by the titles that are used to identify these authorial affects
symptomatic textuality. (The discrete totalities of these details render a world outside of a
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