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

apostrophizes to Browning about his difficulties in finding the correct mode for
dramatizing an objective autobiography. (These lines occur in the 1917 version of the
―Ur-Cantos,‖ published in Chicago by Harriett Monroe's journal Poetry.) Bush guesses
that these lines struck Eliot as being redundant to the path taken earlier in that Canto.
Pound has already engaged in an imagined discussion with Browning where he criticizes
Browning's ―historical sense.‖ Bush makes the logical assumption that Eliot meant to
give Pound advice of the sort that his leaving in of these lines would have been to draw
the reader's attention too closely to the presence of his own personality by the dint of an
otiose and repetitive insistence on Browning‘s habits of distasteful anachronism. Lines
103-119 have the speaker seeking advice in a chary, yet insouciant, fashion from
Browning about the arrangement, direction, and structure of the great poem he is
imagining. These lines begin: ―Or shall I do your trick, the showman's booth,/ Bob
Browning?‖ The 'trick' to which Pound is referring is that of the subtle interior
monologue that Browning affects as he looks in on the diorama booth. Browning‘s reader
is left to her own devices to sort out from whom this monologue emanates as the
protaganist, Sordello, is observed ruminating over his own artistic development.
Browning affects comparison to himself but leaves the things he compares mysterious
and vague. Pound‘s complaint about Browning's ―trick‖ repeats his first complaint, made
right at the poem's beginning:
And half your dates are out, you mix your eras;
For that great font Sordello sat beside -
'Tis an immortal passage, but the font? -
Is some two centuries outside the picture.
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