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

things and artifacts, as they are both concealed and revealed through the efforts of the
antiquarian to understand their significance as objects of fate, open both to profundity and
as artifacts within a developing history, measurable within its relationship to other things
in a collection with like titles. Reading the Ur-Cantos for how they change according to
the editorial horizons through which they were published makes both Pound‘s critical-
antiquariansim clear as well as the advent of a de-personalized poetry that could sustain
its implicit tensions.
2
To situate the difference between my hermeneutic approach to reading Pound‘s
critical antiquarianism it is necessary to demonstrate how I would read the seepage of
poetic indeterminacy into the sociomateriality of Pound's bibliographic codes. To do so
would be to instantiate Benjamin‘s theory of the relationship between words and names
in light of the antiquarianist disposition that celebrates the uncanny, in distinction from
McGann's reflective critique, pointed as it is towards Pound‘s present. As McGann once
did with reference to A Draft of XXX Cantos, I wish to draw special attention to the title
of a volume of Pound's work, 1919s Quia Pauper Amavi. This tends to be a neglected
object in Pound studies. The poems that this volume collected are remembered instead of
the book they first arrived in. For example, the Ur-Cantos (―Three Cantos) are understood
to have been the genetic reservoir to the first four poems that now inaugurate the Cantos.
These early poems are cited most often as examples of what Pound was doing before
Canto IV, where, it is usually argued, Pound demonstrates his first successful attempt at
mature ―impersonality.‖
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