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

―[I]mpersonalizing ‗Three Cantos I‘ altered its dialectical form and its tone,‖ Bush
tells us (42). Impersonalizing but not yet impersonal, this Canto exists as a way-station on
the path towards Pound‘s mature practice of ―impersonality‖ that the revision of these
early cantos would produce with 1925s A Draft of 16. Cantos. But as early as 1918, with
the placement of ―Three Cantos‖ in the journal The Future, Pound looks comfortable
enough with the objectivity of his assumptions about script, text, and the way facts
become biologized within the genetic space of a poem prior to its publication to allow
him to have gone the further distance of objectifying his tutelage to Browning. Pound,
that is, can edit the Ur-Cantos with the clear distinction in his mind over the differences
between his private remonstrance with Browning, the value of Sordello's formal
contribution to the epic tradition, and his indifference to each. I see Pound's engagement
with Browning in the environs of Quia Pauper Amavi differently from Bush and Froula.
They consider the first of the Ur-Cantos to have been an important precursor to Pound's
eventual break with the subjectivist tradition in Canto IV.
In 'Three Cantos' Pound finds no clear resolution to the problem of
reconciling subjective vision with the common world, but a second
version of Canto IV which he composed while writing them
reaches toward a solution that the final Canto IV would test.
(Froula 18)
The actual pattern of Pound's thought about the manuscripts and his obvious indifference
to the problem of the singular narrating consciousness asks we adjust our estimate of his
flight into impersonality. We observe in his parley with Browning a continuation of
Ovid's reception of Propertius and the complicated play with sincerity and decorum that
reception entailed. Pound's ironic title, Quia Pauper Amavi, allows sincerity and satire
their imbrication in the Ur-Cantos, knowable only after we understand the way those Ur-
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