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

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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 59
a diorama booth in which his hero and narrator, Sordello, undergoes changing fortunes as a troubadour. Sordello is also ―Browning,‖ of course. Pound found this authorial conceit distasteful for its anachronizing impossibility, but more pointedly rejects it for the effects on the texture of the historical details that such a posture implied: The very precision demanded in the etching of those details prevents them from being subordinated to any unifying principle – tonal or thematic unity imposed by a single mind, no matter how creative, tends to diminish the sense of jagged clarity. If the texture is made smooth... the details cannot stand out sharply. (Schneidau 140) Schneidau demonstrates his sense of what Pound‘s fragmented narrative means. Schneidau wants Pound's details to be an extension of his affinity for the ―intuitive philology‖ of Gaston Paris, Theodore Reinach, and Leo Frobenius, admired at length by Pound in his essay ―Analysis of this Decade‖ in The New Age Vol. 16, 1915. Pound sees these figures as foils to the ―bean-counting‖ philology that valued enumerative philological practice – death by ―multitudinous detail‖ he would say in 1911‘s ―Osiris‖ essay – over glossing cultural meaning. The consequences of Pound's rejection of the unifying principle of a single narrative consciousness can be seen most clearly in contemporary theories and debates surrounding the relationship between writing and documentary research. These help us to comprehend how we might begin to understand how a de-personalized poetic narrative can be thought to actually come to pass. Textual critics tend to implement some limited use of authorship in their apprehension of poetic works, whereas genetic critics take a more rigorous approach to the definition of a draft – a term Pound was always careful to use about his poetry (after the bullying he took from classics scholars for his translation 60
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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
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Christopher David Chapman practice.
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CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
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objectification, while titles are a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
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taboo, as the following remark indi
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emind us too hastily only of Benjam
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e renewed in philosophical contempl
Page 17 and 18: the word “Title.” I do this out
Page 19 and 20: where fate - the agent of nature‟
Page 21 and 22: Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
Page 23 and 24: come into their meaning through the
Page 25 and 26: meaning in the words he appoints to
Page 27 and 28: ―The Role of Language in Trauersp
Page 29 and 30: God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
Page 31 and 32: conceived of as a pantomime where t
Page 33 and 34: ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
Page 35 and 36: aspects of his linguistic theory th
Page 37 and 38: decision-making powers, we can demo
Page 39 and 40: him to transpose arguments about th
Page 41 and 42: Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
Page 43 and 44: eath of this world, and from it the
Page 45 and 46: magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
Page 47 and 48: elegated to the setting in which th
Page 49 and 50: Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
Page 51 and 52: every locution being, in essence, e
Page 53 and 54: CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
Page 55 and 56: dramatic monologue, a feat he would
Page 57 and 58: terms that this chapter wishes to c
Page 59 and 60: structural factitiousness that the
Page 61 and 62: is implicit to baroque criticisms o
Page 63 and 64: meaning of the poems it collects. P
Page 65 and 66: Pound's fragments as commentary on
Page 67: Few critics read these poems in the
Page 71 and 72: the genetic milieu into which it be
Page 73 and 74: In fact, two complaints can be hear
Page 75 and 76: while keeping lines that praise Bro
Page 77 and 78: Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
Page 79 and 80: Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
Page 81 and 82: George Steiner uncovers the ramific
Page 83 and 84: to register history differently to
Page 85 and 86: commitment to past modes of critica
Page 87 and 88: modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
Page 89 and 90: the case, is deliberately making ou
Page 91 and 92: Pound's genius was to see Propertiu
Page 93 and 94: delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
Page 95 and 96: presence of a continuous patina of
Page 97 and 98: described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
Page 99 and 100: 10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
Page 101 and 102: obsessive desire most critics find
Page 103 and 104: passing from hand to hand, becomes
Page 105 and 106: Propertius as Propertius once had C
Page 107 and 108: saw no viable future for his own ex
Page 109 and 110: then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
Page 111 and 112: ‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
Page 113 and 114: difference between his intention an
Page 115 and 116: itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
Page 117 and 118: subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
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his subjectivity as a blend of fact
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eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
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dogmatic binding and over which to
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Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
Page 127 and 128:
Mill, Jackson notes, finds the conc
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apostrophe to ‗Misery‘ performa
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―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
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to posit a fictional author being n
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neither Rainey‘s Institutions of
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y Piero della Francesca. Pound was
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E gradment li antichi cavaler roman
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that have not traditionally been co
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The library of the dukes of Milan w
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Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
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Bornstein, for example, is interest
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the meaning of Pound‘s text by co
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Do come, do come. I can see us at B
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the political implications of that
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the winners of its game (148). Beca
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iography and how he can be seen to
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to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
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view of Pound‘s political beliefs
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which to describe the force of natu
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interrogation of that two-word theo
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elationships that they believed to
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commemoration is to writing (Derrid
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knowable “as a combination of ato
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new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
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ejects any teleological argument fo
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Ontologies, such as those that belo
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this mystery could only be experien
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attention to the way names effect t
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Adorno acknowledges that Kant‘s w
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understanding how de-personalizatio
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Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
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WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
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The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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