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“... in pursuit of his view that men are really machines pretending to be human. T.S. Eliot and Hugh Kenner thought very highly indeed of Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, published in 1955 with the first part of The Childermass as The Human Age, Kenner even going so far as to say that Lewis here is ...”

“... concept of national loyalty, it is possible to read much of his verse as a protest against what Hugh Haughton terms ‘the indignity of King Log’. Haughton argues that Hill seems to yearn ‘for real authority and real title, the kind of transcendence embodied in a language of kingship derived from the past and earlier power-relations’. It is a serious ...”

“... admission: the thoughts of Pound, Aiken, Leavis, D. W. Harding, Helen Gardner, John Crowe Ransom, Hugh Kenner and Davie shine again. But there is a lot of dross, and there are too many ill-judged omissions. If Stevie Smith’s piece on Murder in the Cathedral fails to be a review, it succeeds in being admirably inaugurative. Even the immediate ...”

“... Lament for Julia, and when her novel, Divorcing, was published in the US in 1969, it was panned by Hugh Kenner in the New York Times as the work of a ‘lady novelist’. A few days later, at the age of 41, she walked into the sea in the Hamptons. Sontag identified the body.The fiction was out of print for decades, but in recent years there has been a ...”

“... It is wonderful how Professor Kenner can keep on about Ulysses, always interesting and relevant and hardly repeating himself at all. His book gives a survey of books about Ulysses, mentioning only two previous ones by himself. He weeds out bad ideas and adds more promising ones, always with acknowledgement to other critics: and it is impressive that he had plenty more material available for the centenary collection, A Starchamber Quiry, just after printing his own book ...”

“... epiphanies, only anti-epiphanies. One way to think about Antrim is as a stoic comedian, the term Hugh Kenner applied to Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett (as well as Buster Keaton). ‘The stoic,’ Kenner wrote, ‘is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him ...”

“... current reputation is based on a questionable reading of the work. Modernist critics such as Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport and Kenneth Cox were earlier advocates and all wrote with enthusiasm and insight about Zukofsky, all three regarding him as the pre-eminent American poet born in the 20th century, although Cox later changed his mind. Donald ...”

“... not matter in an autobiography. In reading Ford Madox Ford’s autobiographies I am worried, as Hugh Kenner does not seem to be, by the sense that Ford neither knows nor cares what truth is; it disturbs me not to know whether some strange thing actually happened to Swinburne, or whether Ford just made it up. But Conrad, Sartre and Yeats were all men ...”

“... n’y en a pas.’ Mapping Flaubert on Beckett will seem anachronistic but, as Hugh Kenner once suggested, they are kindred souls in the half-heroic, half-clownish stoicism with which they commit themselves to a project whose foundations, boundaries and finalities always elude them (Kenner’s book ...”

“... also means the popular and the recondite, are characteristic of the poetry of any age. But, as Hugh Kenner points out in a typically brilliant if somewhat perverse essay called simply ‘Responsibilities’, Davie’s concern for poetic language is really a concern for culture as the modern equivalent of theology. ‘The Englishman who was pulled in ...”

“... back to the basics of literary criticism, and he aligns himself with similarly inclined critics (Hugh Kenner, John Hollander, Richard Poirier, Lionel Trilling, and above all Empson) who use theory, when they use it at all, for the most part to clear the ground for attentive reading. The phrase which serves as the title of the collection is taken from ...”

“... part in the forming of our thoughts.’ This wouldn’t have come as news to Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner’s mentor at the University of Toronto in the mid-1940s who in 1967 published The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. McLuhan once got Kenner to drive him (he didn’t drive) to visit Ezra Pound in ...”

“... these writers to the war merely barren. Pound, who was to write the magnificent lines about it in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (‘These fought in any case,’ etc), had already produced a memorable ‘war poem’ in ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, of which he wrote that ‘it presents certain emotions as vital to me in 1917 faced with the infinite and ineffable ...”

“... of others’ work is low, especially by American standards, and with the single exception of Hugh Kenner no practising fellow academic earns the accolade of even approaching classic status. Ricks’s sympathy and magnanimity, two great ‘principles’ of his criticism (of which more anon), are reserved here for the dead. Ricks does indeed ...”

“... Giedion in Mechanisation Takes Command, Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilisation, and especially Hugh Kenner in The Counterfeiters and The Mechanic Muse, as well as, more distantly, Friedrich Kittler (‘discourse networks’), Gilles Deleuze (‘control society’) and Jacques Attali (‘the political economy of music’). Although more technologically ...”