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

Few critics read these poems in their adjacency within the greater bibliographical
environment of QPA. Profitably utilizing McGann's approach to the sociomaterial instant
means finding in the poetic order of Pound's text a clue towards how he deploys the
bibliographic codes governed by such a seemingly picayune title. Only through close
attention to the editorial decisions governing the genetic production of the Ur-Cantos can
we begin to disentwine the wrong-headed premises concerning the advent of modernist
impersonality that govern their current reception from their actual entrée into the de-
personalized poetry that Pound was developing.
―[Q]uia pauper amavi,‖ then, is a quotation of the latter half of a hexameter line,
in the second book of Ovid's putatively cynical conduct poem, Ars Amatoriae. The whole
couplet (2.165-166) reads: ―Pauperibus vates ego sum, quia pauper amavi;/ Cum dare non
possem munera, verba dabam‖ [―I am the bard of the poor because I loved as a poor
man;/ Since I could not give gifts, I gave words‖]. In colloquial Latin ―verba dabam‖
(―gave words‖) held an unusual connotation. It could also mean ―used deceit.‖ Pound's
image for this volume, then, implies a direct attack on the sentiment of sincerity that
Ovid‘s ironic conduct book would seem to signify. This changes the way we receive
Pound's lyric voice in any of the poems that follow under this title. The most significant
place to observe Pound's prevarication over the authenticity and sincerity of his lyric
presence, and his discovery of the stance of de-personalization, occurs in the Ur-Cantos
as they are presented in Quia Pauper Amavi. It is there that Pound is most concerned to
take on the implication of duplicity and insincerity signaled by the Ovidian title. At stake
in the ―Three Cantos‖ is the identity, the name, of who it is that is speaking – Pound or a
fictional author that the poem instantiates as its own attempt at de-personalization.
58