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

meaning of the poems it collects. Pound, for McGann, assumes that a complicated
continuum exists between words and things, as the indexical apparatus of a text assumes
parity with the poetic verbal icon it contains:
A poem containing history, written in the twentieth century, means
not simply ―the tale of the tribe,‖ but the self-conscious
presentation of such a tale. It is therefore a poem which will have
already theoretically imagined a critical edition of itself. A
twentieth-century poem containing history will have to invent and
display, somehow, at least the equivalent of footnotes,
bibliography, and other scholarly paraphernalia. (Textual
Condition 129)
McGann is exactly right in his curtailed assumption about that word-thing, text
and ―paraphernalia,‖ connection. Pound's imagination for the materiality of language isn't
capacious and liberal. His sense of satiric precision demands that we know how the
meaning of a word is ordered by its past textual use, making his attention to language
amenable to Benjamin‘s belief that structural assumptions about a word‘s arbitrariness
only reveals the degree to which that word is being suppressed by a culture enthralled to
the authority of titles. The purpose of Pound's imagination for the thingness of his poetry
opens theoretic discussion to the kind of play between names and titles incumbent upon
Benjamin‘s theory of language. McGann believes that the Cantos‘ mode of material
presentation offers his readers a critical history rather than one that is antiquarian. This
seems to be the correct, if inevitable, provision best afforded by McGann's close study of
the things through which Pound's poems arrive. Instead of forming a poetic devotion to
empirical things, showing that there is a hermeneutic procedure, made available in
Benjamin‘s theory of language, through which to observe the Cantos‘ patterns of
aesthetic reflection alters the determination that they are only critical of their immediate
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