On Pound's Cantos (Antony Easthope)

Although there is of course no question of a return to the feudal ballad, modern poetry and especially that of the "Cantos" is more like the ballad than it is like anything from the intervening discourse of the bourgeois epoch. At stake in modernism, once again, is the definition of subject position. All the tactics, including those given manifesto treatment as "the tradition" and the ""ideogram," can be understood as working towards a single end---to foreground signifier over signified, to acknowledge that the reader is positioned as subject of enunciation producing the enounced of the poem. (Poetry as Discourse, 134)