Jonathan and others Pound stated that metamorphosis was to be one of the central themes of his poem. In Canto II he begins his study of metamorphosis. He suspends the process and tears it apart as part of that study. To me any other reading must be secondary to this theme. As far as Marxist theory is concerned perhaps the fault lays with society instead of with modernism. Maybe the "material processes of social reality" just aren't as real as Marxists have assured us they are. Rick Seddon McIntosh, NM .