Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Symbolisme being regularly associated, in his essays and manifestos, with ro-
mantic “slush.”
Why then invoke these particular names? Before we can answer this ques-
tion, we must deal with the even trickier case of the lines:

with the cakeshops in the Nevsky,

And Sirdar, Armenonville or the Kashmiri house-boats

The “cakeshops in the Nevsky”—that is, along the main boulevard of Peters-
burg, with its architectural splendors—have already appeared in earlier Pisan
Cantos. The ¤rst citation of the Nevsky Prospect itself is in Canto 16, written
some twenty years prior to Pound’s incarceration at Pisa. Canto 16 is the third
of the Hell Cantos; it juxtaposes World War I scenes with a dialogue in imi-
tation Russian and German accents based on the account of the Russian
Revolution in Lincoln Steffens’s Autobiography, arranged by Pound in para-
tactic sentence units:

And then a lieutenant of infantry

Ordered ’em to ¤re into the crowd,

in the square at the end of the Nevsky

In front of the Moscow station,

And they wouldn’t...

(16/75)

The next appearance of the Nevsky, this time the site not of Revolution but
of cake shops, is in Canto 19 and occurs in the pre–World War I conversation
of the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to London, who is reminiscing about
the Good Old Days:

That was in the old days, all sitting around in arm-chairs,

And that’s gone, like the cake shops in the Nevsky

(19/86)

The reference reappears, some twenty years later, in the ¤rst Pisan Canto:

Sirdar, Bouiller and Les Lilas

or Dieudonné London, or Voisin’s

Uncle George stood like a statesman “REI ΠANTA

¤lls up every hollow

Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 53