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

while keeping lines that praise Browning's inventiveness and near solution to the problem
of the role of the narrator in the modern verse epic. Pound leaves in the following lines of
praise for the way Browning had: ―Worked out the form, meditative, semi-dramatic,/
Semi-epic story.‖ This acknowledgment comes after an interlude away from his dialogue
with Browning. In that interlude Pound imagines himself transported into the light-filled
world of Catullus's Sirmio. These lines of praise are thematically redundant, qualifying
his assessment of Browning's technique in the now familiar ―brother's speech‖ and ought,
given the supposition over Eliot‘s criticism advanced by Bush, also to have been excised.
This compliment is struck from 1918's version of the Ur-Cantos published in the literary
journal The Future. They were, however, left in 1917's Lustra, and then again let to stand
in 1919s QPA. We know that Eliot's editorial advice was made in reference to drafts of
the poem he saw in the months before their being published in Poetry (1917).
Pound's inconsistent pattern of revision indicates that the total significance of
Sordello's delirious historicity, Browning's ―semi‖ successful dramatic model for
overcoming the anachronizing problems inherent to the presence of a single subjective
narrator, and Eliot's editorial advice, cannot be relegated to Pound's worries about the role
and manner with which the poet's own voice might be made to knowingly intrude in the
modern long poem. Nor can it be made amenable merely to the serious, but formally
secondary, problem concerning anachronism and verisimilitude. Were these positions,
severally or together, sufficient, we would be better able to explain Pound's eccentric
excision of his own narrative voice in dialogue with Browning, struck from The Future's
printing of the Ur-Cantos and then returned under new qualifications in Lustra and QPA.
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