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

The critics who have made the most substantial contribution to our understanding
of Pound's use of the personal, subjective, and lyrical voice – Christine Froula, Ronald
Bush, and Herb Schneidau – concur that it was in his parley with Robert Browning in the
Ur-Cantos over the appropriateness of authorial intrusion into modernist epic poetry that
Pound came to make his greatest contribution to the formal resources of literary
modernism. The achievement of an objective ―impersonality‖ occurs, it is argued, after
Pound learns to discard the subjective unity of a single narrative voice. This occurs, then,
much later than 1919‘s publication of QPA and Pound's remonstrance with Browning.
These critics locate that event at least six years later with the first publication of the
Cantos proper in 1925s A Draft of 16. Cantos. However, by utilizing a hermeneutic
approach to Pound's fragmented narrative that compliments and carefully subverts
Jerome McGann's materialist strategies for textual disambiguation, it is possible to open
that judgment for reassessment.
Herb Schneidau explains that Pound ultimately refused to consolidate his poem
behind a single synthetic mask, as had been Browning's practice. To arrive at this
rejection Pound takes on the most difficult of Browning's dramatic personae, Sordello.
Pound learns that the affected stance Browning used to organize his intentionally
fragmented and disorienting poem concerning the Guelph and Ghibbeline uprisings in
Renaissance Italy would not be sufficient to the kind of poem he wished to write, one
where the critical elements of his research could display their own allegorical
anachronism outside of a cohesive narrative tethered to an authorial sense of their
historicity within a predetermined narrative that would assimilate them to simple cause
and effect. Sordello uses a narrative voice that shuttles between ―Browning‖ looking over
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