The overflow of the literary movement characterized as `high modernism' onto the spaces inhabited by politics has been conclusively established. Pound's contribution to this excess is so well documented that it has become almost a critical commonplace. The relationship between Pound's polemic against positivist philology as practiced in German as well as American universities, Pound's insistence on the unified heritage of European poetry, Pound's attempts to purify the language of poetry to return it to the signified, Pound's interest in economic theories and the numerous translations undertaken by him serves as a point of departure for this paper. The critical essays by Pound yield a lot of information about his attitude towards language. Language cannot be innocent of ethical and consequently political charge in Pound's conception of it.
The mode in which linguistic referentiality operates is central to Pound's imagism. The apparently unimpeded movement between things, their perception, and the image is conceived by Pound through the supposed non-phonetic and ideogrammatic quality of the Chinese character. This paper seeks to elucidate the links between the representational theory of language espoused by Pound and his fascist politics. The representational theory of language necessarily entails a notion of the `original language' from which all languages developed. This `ur-sprache' is the key to understanding Pound's confidence in the translatability of texts.
Pound vehemently opposed the aestheticising of the functions of poetry. For him, the chief function of poetry was not to delight but to speak prophetically to society. The gap between Pound and E.E. Cummings consists of their divergence on this point. Though Cummings' typographical and rhythmic innovations in poetry and his social criticism is apparently close to Pound's practices Cummings did not believe in the seer like role in which Pound cast the poet. It can be argued that Cummings' novel presentations of poems on the page are derived from the innovations introduced in the layouts of journals and newspapers rather than an overarching poetics as advocated by Pound. The term `high modernism' implies the existence of other, perhaps local kinds of modernism. Pound's conflation of the widely differing discourses of poetry, economics and politics can be explored in this context.
The return to the theme of the lingua adamica, characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a means of regaining the origins of language in the works of T. E. Hulme and of Pound reflects a sameness with a difference. A meditation on this difference concludes this paper.

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