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

to register history differently to the fact-seeking tendencies American historiography had
inherited from German Romantic Philology. History, poetically presented, could be more
than merely a record against which one could construe contemporary differences and
change.
It is this commitment that connects Pound most obviously to Walter Benjamin. A
few words about Benjamin‟s sense of how “natural history” could be displayed are
necessary to encounter, such that Pound‟s interests in displaying history without
comment can be seen for their consanguineity with Benjamin‟s more clearly:
The interest which the materialist historian takes in the past is
always, in part, a vital interest in its being past – in its having
ceased to exist, its being essentially dead. To have certified this
condition with respect to the whole is the indispensable
prerequisite for any citation (any calling to life) of particular parts
of the phenomenon of what-has-been. In a word: for the specific
historical interest whose legitimacy it is up to the materialist
historian to establish, it must be shown that one is dealing with an
object which in its entirety, actually and irrevocably, ―belongs to
history‖ (Arcades 363).
This statement from The Arcades Project summarizes one of the two components in
Benjamin's thinking about what he would call ―the dialectical image.‖ A dialectical
image is constructed when antinomial ways of thinking about the past are brought
together through a critic's apprehension of the vital significance of a particular object or
historical citation. These two kinds of historicism are symbolized by two different kinds
of artist/critic – the Allegorist and the Collector. A short recount of their identities is
useful if we are to see how Pound‘s de-personalized poetry exemplifies their traits.
The Allegorist, Benjamin argues, thinks about the materials of history in an open-
ended but theoretically secondary fashion. Of first importance to the Allegorist is the
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