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

contradictory registers of symbolic experience that obtain between linguistic and
bibliographic-/material- codes and how these relate to one another in determining the
meaning of a poetic object. McGann helps to clarify his hypothesis that Pound's details
diagram the broken concepts that underwrite myths of historical continuity when he
suggests that ―the Cantos is a work which is constantly reflecting upon itself, and not
simply in a meditative way‖ (129). Pound's works, for McGann, do more than elicit an
aesthetic interest in the strangeness of their references and the imagery they come to find
themselves textualized in. In general, poetics of conceptual fragmentation do not have to
invite the separation of the concept‘s provenance from its actual referent. In fact, this is
largely the premise through which McGann reads Pound‘s poetry when he finds durable
evidence for his claim that the Cantos reflective habits are formed in a space that lies
beyond the surface of their poetic narratives in the thingness of the very books Pound
publishes.
In fact, for McGann, the Cantos‘ reflective artifice is only capable of being
noticed after we have discovered the significance behind the non-linguistic, bibliographic
orders embodying his books‘ thinngness. Reflection and the appointment of significance
to the narrative of the Cantos, McGann argues, occur retrospectively. A fragment's
meaning is revealed after our apprehension of its material belongings. This allows us to
observe the way these materials comment upon and clarify the metaphoric/meditative
character of Pound's poetry. For McGann, the luminous nature of Pound's materials does
not occur primarily through hermeneutic strategies of factual instantiation and the
empirical methods of modern philology we use to verify provenance and determine
poetic meaning. McGann‘s emphasis on reflection, like Benjamin‘s on the amanensis that
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