Hugh Kenner: The Kenner Era

Hugh Kenner, detector and plotter of synergetic forces, pays great attention to encounters; let us begin with some. Thirty-six years ago he holed up in a cabin outside Peterborough, Ontario, and in two weeks wrote a book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (unfashionable title for the times, which went in for emblematic ones, like The Well- Wrought Urn, and Ezra Pound’s poetry shared the academic contempt of his politics). Young Kenner, a graduate student at Yale, took the manuscript to James Laughlin, the publisher of New Directions. That encounter relaunched Kenner’s career. It had begun before, in a thoroughly Canadian way, with a book called Paradox in Chesterton, which was, shall we say, Torontonian, facing toward England, smartly provincial, proper groundwork for a career as a professor of English.

Kenner’s book was a great light dispelling darkness. I had seen this brilliant intelligence first in a book of essays on Joyce, and then on Pound in the newly founded Hudson Review, and I stood in awe of the architectural prose and the sense that here was a mind with such gifts of analysis and synthesis that it could show us—as it has—what modernist writing meant, what its achievement was.

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Guy Davenport

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Hugh Kenner, detector and plotter of synergetic forces, pays great attention to encounters; let us begin with some. Thirty-six years ago he holed up in a cabin outside Peterborough, Ontario, and in two weeks wrote a book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (unfashionable title for the times, which went in for emblematic ones, like The Well- Wrought Urn, and Ezra Pound’s poetry shared the academic contempt of his politics). Young Kenner, a graduate student at Yale, took the manuscript to James Laughlin, the publisher of New Directions. That encounter relaunched Kenner’s career. It had begun before, in a thoroughly Canadian way, with a book called Paradox in Chesterton, which was, shall we say, Torontonian, facing toward England, smartly provincial, proper groundwork for a career as a professor of English.

Kenner’s book was a great light dispelling darkness. I had seen this brilliant intelligence first in a book of essays on Joyce, and then on Pound in the newly founded Hudson Review, and I stood in awe of the architectural prose and the sense that here was a mind with such gifts of analysis and synthesis that it could show us—as it has—what modernist writing meant, what its achievement was.