“... critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... it all in train, like the butterfly whose wings started the storm. In his 1980 book on Ulysses, Hugh Kenner wrote that there was a rumour that Griffith had a ‘Jewish adviser-ghostwriter’, but the annotators here state that they ‘have been unable to substantiate the existence of such a rumour’. Unless, of course, the rumour is in Ulysses ...”

“... which suffers from pretentiousness, vague abstraction and slapstick. The following year, Hugh Kenner published a lacerating review in Poetry. ‘The unbelievable badness of these poems,’ he began, ‘is irrelevant to any criteria of technique.’ It’s difficult to argue against Kenner’s charge of ...”

“... What exactly, then, is Lentricchia up to? It’s possible that he means to extend and revise Hugh Kenner’s magisterial survey, The Pound Era (1971), in the light of more recent theoretical and literary-historical preoccupations. Like Kenner, he clearly regards the Modernist enterprise, with its insistence on ...”

“... and style parodistic of the quartets that preceded it. This proposal took off from an idea of Hugh Kenner’s, and any theory with two such exceptionally able sponsors needs treating with respect. The element of likelihood in this one derives from the way it locates Eliot’s work within that ‘Age of Criticism’ which Modernism helped to ...”

“... service far better. Late in life Merrill, who simply pretended that modernism never happened, read Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era with great interest. Merrill had no prior interest in Pound and the ‘heave’ that broke the back of the pentameter. His view was: why bother? The pentameter was just fine. But The Pound Era (at only 561 pages) is an ...”