Brandon,
You mentioned Yeats, in the context of cosmological cycles, in the section
of your message that I snipped. I come back to your message and your
question, "Would not Pound himself be the 'center'...?"  because of  what
Jonathan Morse wrote recently about Pound's apparent lack of remorse: "I
think he never apologized because he never really understood his own
misdeeds as anything more than personal."
 
With respect to what Pound might have meant by "center" -- one can look to
Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" (1921):
 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of a passionate intensity.
 
It is unlikely that these famous lines by Yeats were not somewhere in the
back of Pound's mind when he wrote "I lost my center."  Also present in his
mind would have been the unwobbling pivot. I read Pound's lines as his
admission of a  mental breakdown.
 
Tim Romano
 
Brandon Rizzo wrote
 
[...]
 
> From the very end of the Cantos, from his Drafts & Fragments:
> "That I lost my center / fighting the world. / The dreams clash / and are
> shattered--/ and that I tried to make a paradiso/ terrestre". Would not
Pound
> himself be the 'center', so to speak, heaven and earth revolving around
him?
>
>