The Poetry of Ezra Pound

by Hugh Kenner, James Laughlin (Foreword by)

This pioneering study did much to rehabilitate Ezra Pound's reputation after a long period of critical hostility and neglect. Published in 1951, it was the first comprehensive examination of the Cantos and other major works that would strongly influence the course of contemporary poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Criticism, Literature, Literary Criticism

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

Reviews

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book, one of the first critical attempts to come to terms with Pound. The problem Pound presented the critical establishment is met head on here by Kenner: the dominant critical reading practice of the time simply didn't work with his poems. You can watch Kenner trying to find ways of explaining why he thinks Pound is a great poet. Whether or not he succeeds, it's an interesting spectacle.
Not as readable as Kenner's later books, he had apparently read all of Pound's prose criticism to find his way into the poetry and at times the sounds almost as opinionated and strident as Ezra.
It's still a great intro to Pound.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The business of the poet is to fix for recurrent contemplation such rare accesses of insight and emotion. (It will be recalled that Pound was over a year finding the exact image to evoke his emotion on emerging into the crowd from a Paris subway.) The size and position of the invisible sphere can be indicated by a few tangents. The invisible fields of force surrounding the magnet can be apprehended through the behavior of multitudinous particles of iron. The usual inquiry into the sources of poetic images throws about as much light on the verse as analysis of the graphite in pencilled teangents does on the undrawn circle. When we have seen that the tangents are not stray lines, that the filings were not disposed by random scatter, we are in a position to intuit the controlling mystery. There is no incoherence..." (Kenner, 199-200).

Consisting of three parts, entitled, "Ching Ming"; "Personae"; and "Cantos," Hugh Kenner's long out of print effort at popularizing the work of his mentor (and literary hero) Ezra Pound, is work quite similar to the work it analyzes: obscure, erudite, recondite, and, ultimately, hopeful. For this work, which reads like a dissertation for a Phd degree, is filled with quotations from Pound's work, both prose and poetry, which seek to elucidate the work of Pound against the charge of obscurantism. This effort is largely successful, for one gains from a perusal of this work a sense of Pound's aims, to unify history, poetry, and the world (even), to the tees. The references to John Adams, Confucius, Social Credit, T.S. Eliot, Chaucer, the troubadours, and the whole history of Western (and Eastern) thought are all here. This is to the credit of Mr. Kenner, who truly believes in his literary icon and hero, Ezra Pound. However, due to my own limitations, and (perhaps?) to the limitations of the work itself, the work of Pound still seems slightly obscured by its obsessions and its idiosyncratic nature (Ideograms, metaphors, and 'Ford-ian' and 'Flaubert-ian' plot destruction). The end 'feel' I received from attempting this effort is that it was an effort 'too much,' and too darkened by obfuscations inherent in the subject matter and its delivery. Could a better written tome have cleared up these obscurities? Possibly. As such, this book is to be recommended to the hardest core of Poundian acolytes, like Mr. Kenner, but, in the meanwhile, count me out of the whole process.

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

I continue to think that anyone who loves poetry or the world of the mind (to which academia is related but not representative) ought to read Kenner. He, as one professor of Modern Poetry put it, "must have been something." It is a combination of utterly clear thinking expressed in an argumentative prose that does not drag and, while it makes no patronizing concessions to the reader, neither does it aim above the reader's head to deliberately obfuscate (as one feels a great number of people with "Ph.D" after their names tend to do). It is, as Poe might put it, "that monstrum horrendum," the scholarly argument that one enjoys reading. Check it out, and if you don't respect Pound (and the whole theory of the academy) more by the time you're done, you get a full refund on this review.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book which put Pound on the 'academic stock exchange', as Laughlin had it, correctly, is mainly worth the five stars every Poundian will give it, unless three-quarters of a century later you're having to produce essays possibly read by twenty people about what it gets wrong about Pound and China and Japan.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cantos, here I come!

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

According to the two introductions, this book is singlehandedly responsible both for the success of New Directions and for getting Ezra Pound's poetry into college curricula. Good, but not a page-turner like Kenner's later books.