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

and American speech dialects free from worries of producing accurate translations. But,
what of Pound‘s ―use [of] antique material‖? What of Pound's ability ―to treat it with
verbal archaism‖? This chapter makes the case for remembering the centrality of that
antiquarian disposition in Pound‘s thoughts in the context of his anti-mimetic thinking
about the Method of the Luminous Detail, and how it could foil the presentist bias that
Pound felt to have made London‘s avant-garde sclerotic. It is this method that correctly
aligns Pound with Benjamin‘s theory of language and his interest in finding a mode of
modernist expression that allows the taboo on natural history to be lifted. Here, the lost
antique criticism that would have attended upon what has become the now giant figure of
Propertius within the Roman elegiac tradition.
Perhaps the most important effect on Pound criticism, spurred by McGann's focus
on a text's bibliographic codes, has been the shift in that canon of critical texts we use to
explicate Pound's ars poetica. While ―Imagism‖ is dogmatically explained in the
retrospective essay, ―A Few Dont's..,.‖ after McGann's focus on the constructivist register
that Pound exploited through the medium of bookmaking, we are behooved to regard the
earlier essay ―I Gather the Limbs of Osiris‖ (1911) for its discussion of the ―Method of
the Luminous Detail‖ in which Pound disavows the caprice of mimetic artifice at the
expense of poetry‘s charge to present something more akin to documentary veracity. This
essay has become the more salient text for understanding how Pound approached the
materials of his work. It sets out the principal problem that it would be his purpose to
overcome. Pound identifies his preferred method for explaining historical events and
conditions through presenting historical details without commentary and interpretation.
For Pound, at stake was a commitment towards the way literary tradition could be made
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