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

Cantos deliver a poetic condition in which authorial deceit has been rendered hapless by
Pound‘s disposition over his own narratological position within the world of his poem.
Pound‘s critical-antiquarianism – the prizing of the exogenetic detail over its endogenetic
narrative emplotment – that his parley with Browning helped him to achieve, allowed
him to de-personalize ―Three Cantos.‖ This allows the presentation of the story of his
own tutelage to Browning in a manner that demonstrates his narratological advance as if
it were fate‘s product, the force of the detail over the narrative it is enfolded within.
When Pound‘s indifference to his own authority is made apparent in the history of the
editorial changes that governed the publication of the Ur-Cantos is made apparent, we
can understand that a poetic form becomes available in which he can actualize the
archaic representation of a thing, unlike Browning whose interfering narratological
anachronism causes him to reduce textual objects such as that ―Venetian font‖ to the
property-making power enlisted by the genetic forces of his poem‘s title that serves to
smooth out his appropriation. In this, the Ur-Cantos demonstrate the plausability of
Benjamin‘s tacit theory that when the Collector removes real historical details from the
realm of their being possessed by historical narratives that insist upon the authority of
their titles, into the world of things as they would have appeared in their real moment,
that they are participating in the composition of natural history. This necessary
experiment in de-personalization would help Pound to find in Propertius a forgotten
theme that his translation of the Roman elegist would reveal.
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