I am wondering if the list can come to my assistance again as it so helpfully has done before. Is there any evidence to suggest that Pound ever regarded allegory in a positive light? I am thinking of Lawrence S. Rainey's excellent thesis in EZRA POUND AND THE MONUMENT OF CULTURE (U. of Chicago, 1991) concerning Pound's determination against historical evidence available from Soranzo to regard the S/I emblems in their sense of the first two letters of Sigismondo's name as protective cloaks standing for their secret meaning as supposed commemorations of Sigismondo's love for Isotta (their respective initials interlaced). Pound follows older scholarship, according to Rainey, in regarding the second meaning as a secret intended only for his supporters. (I see that this older meaning is resurrected with historical justification I am not qualified to judge in Maria Grazia Pernis and Laurie Schneider Adams, FEDERICO DA MONTEFELTRO AND SIGISMONDO MALATESTA: THE EAGLE AND THE ELEPHANT, Peter Lang, 1996.) It strikes me that Pound's determination shows awareness of the tradition stemming from Francis Bacon and very much alive in nineteenth-century studies in comparative mythology regarding allegories: 'Concerning human wisdom, I do indeed ingenuously and freely confess that I am inclined to imagine that under some of the ancient fictions lay couched certain mysteries and allegories even from their first invention. And I am persuaded . . . that no man can constantly deny but this sense was in the authors' intent and meaning when they first invented them, and that they purposely shadowed it in this sort.' If one attends to allegorical meaning as residing underneath rather than on the surface then one would be near to Ruskin's triadic notion of myth as having a meaning eternally and beneficently true beneath its shifting natural and historical meanings, though this shades into 'symbols'. One would perhaps normally think of Pound as being on the side of natural rather than conventional signs (as in the Fenellosa materials or the honorific contrast of Cavalcanti's imagery with Petrach's detachable ornament in the 1928 'Cavalcanti' essay) and to be opposed, largely, to the deadness of Victorian allegory, but does he ever honour the latter, or show great understanding of the function of allegory in Renaissance art and literature? What is the latest verdict, for example, of his interest in the Tura frescoes at Ferrara? Richard Read. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr Richard Read Email [log in to unmask] Senior Lecturer School of Architecture and Fine Arts The University of Western Australia Nedlands WA 6009 Tel +61 8 9380 2140 Australia Fax 8 9380 1082