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

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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. 63
In fact, two complaints can be heard. One has to do with the authority of the narrator as dramatized by the author, a kind of appeal for advice in the ―brother's speech‖ of fellow poets. This complaint is the logical outcome of Browning's decision to half-reveal his own disguised presence in his poem. The second complaint is a direct criticism of Browning himself for his indefensible unscholarly anachronism. Browning, Pound is arguing, textualizes history by allowing his poem's organic endogenetic logic to run the reality of its exogenetic details – the Venetian font – aground. Pound's details operate oppositely. He allows exogenetic details to stand out by inviting his readers to interrogate their scripted instances within the genetic space created by the wake of the publication history of the Ur-Cantos and the ensuing critical commentary we imagine to have impinged upon it: Eliot‘s advice foremost. That is, as Pound overcame the insistence of the author's hand directing us to find final meanings, he could make the distinction between his own private discourse with Browning and his analytic criticism of Sordello's historicity in the same poem. Sordello, given Bush's assumptions about Pound‘s motive, failed to make the necessary connection between veracity and decorum. The indeterminacies of the narrator's historical position served to obscure and diminish the poem's entire deictic structure. Was Browning, in his ―brother's speech‖ with Sordello, affecting to be Sordello's contemporary or are we to believe in the diorama-booth's mid nineteenth-century position as being stationary and Browning‘s voice just another imaginary persona? This kind of insecurity surrounding narration wouldn't allow Pound the freedom to register a variety of historical figures and evidentiary matter in the same text as it would become his practice in the Cantos. These 64
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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
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the word “Title.” I do this out
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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 and 68: Few critics read these poems in the
Page 69 and 70: a diorama booth in which his hero a
Page 71: the genetic milieu into which it be
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
Page 119 and 120: his subjectivity as a blend of fact
Page 121 and 122: eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
Page 123 and 124:
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
Page 187 and 188:
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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