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

mistakes leave the author‘s hand in the text available as its explanation and point of
organizational focus.
Pound's actual published revisions reveal that he was indifferent to Eliot's advice.
Eliot, it seems, was mistaken about the nature of Pound's critique of Browning, believing
it to have been only an issue concerning Browning's subjectivist bias towards rendering
historical details and the unacceptable anachronism that it created. The first and second
parleys with Browning in the first of the three Ur-Cantos over facts and how to present
them appeared to Eliot to be two different ways of addressing the same problem. Pound
may have been indifferent towards the nature of Eliot's advice, but was far from
inhospitable. Pound's actions were several and varied towards the way he would allow his
remonstrance with Browning to play itself out in the Cantos. It seems that Pound trusted
Eliot's eye for the appearance of thematic redundancy while understanding that his actual
interest in Browning wasn't that of finding a proximate target to crusade against in the
name of true and apt historicism. Pound sees in Browning's complex narrator a necessary
step upon which he had to make an advance if he was to forego the subjectivist bias over
historical details that that stance enforced.
The concern Pound felt about Browning's subjectivist bias, evident in his private
dialogue with Browning in the language of Sordellian ―brother's speech‖ and his
analytical critique of Browning's factitious history, can be observed when we set the lines
Pound did excise, concerning both poetic technique and historical veracity, against those
he chose to let remain. Pound does away with
What a hodge-podge you have made there! -
Zanze and swanzig, of all opprobrious rhymes!
And you turn off whenever it suits your fancy,
Now at Verona, now with the early Christians,
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