The Pound Era

by Hugh Kenner

"Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era could as well be known as the Kenner era, for there is no critic who has more firmly established his claim to valuable literary property than has Kenner to the first three decades of the 20th century in England. Author of pervious studies of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pound (to name a few), Kenner bestrides modern literature if not like a colossus then at least a presence of formidable proportions. A new book by him is certainly an event....A demanding, enticing book that glitters at the same time it antagonizes...."The Pound Era presents us with an idiosyncratic but sharply etched skeletal view of our immediate literary heritage."—The New York Times

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Literature

624 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brodsky once said that unless critic and artist share the same "plane of regard," criticism is pointless. Kenner is an ideal elucidator of Pound (and, in other books, of Joyce and Eliot and Beckett) because his erudition and imaginative power are comparable to his subject. This isn't just an example of clairvoyant literary criticism, of seemingly omniscient cultural commentary--it's also a work of art. Kenner is a major stylist.

(And to enjoy it you don't have to be into Pound. I'm not. Nabokov, who called The Cantos "costume jewelry," liked this book.)

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the end of the century, in France, whole poems have been made "too subtle for the intellect," held together, as effects are, by the extra-semantic affinities of their words. Picking up a name that was once thrown around as their authors, we have learned to call them "Symbolist" poems.

Kenner tries to tackle Uncle Ez on his own terms, which is to say in a vernacular both polyglot and from the hip, it is Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 by way of a checkered confederacy, one with suspicious politics. I found passages to be remarkable and others a fair stretch. The opening detail featuring an encounter between Pound and Henry James heightened my expectations but ultimately the books drew inspiration from the Vorticist circle and their associates, Wyndham Lewis, Joyce, William Carlos Williams and by extension Eliot and Moore. I recall Kenner musing over direction in his correspondence with Guy Davenport Questioning Minds: Volumes I and II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner but the result isn't as compelling as I would have imagined.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five stars for almost everything, but the one-offs which sixty years later keep being repeated are my interest. Where Kenner is right he remains unsurpassed. Where he is wrong he remains the authority which has taken half a century to begin to get beyond. Pay attention to everything except when he pretends to understand anything about Pound's China and Japan, which has nothing to do with Aristototle, for starters.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's proof that literary criticism can be sheer joy to read.

I might recommend this book for its literary merits alone--Kenner's prose has the depth, precision, and fun of Nabokov's--but the range of learning here is also quite stunning. It's an education. You may not always agree with Kenner's narrative of modernism, but he certainly makes a strong case for the centrality of Pound. As a bonus, you can move on to The Cantos afterwards and commence to make sense of them.

I envy those reading it for the first time, but the third and fourth readings ain't so bad either.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like so much of his work, this book is a marvel of style. Hugh Kenner is able to evoke the personalities of the time as lightly as the line drawing that graces its cover. I read this when I was about 18 and not well versed in the various writers and artists he addressed in this work, so really it was more Kenner I was absorbing at the time. This is one of those books I keep meaning to read again, especially since the crowd he describes have remained some of my favorite writers.

[Paul Holland · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first read this as a student it blew my mind. Like listening to Jimi Hendrix for the first time. It redefined how I thought I should react to literature and my relationship with it. I hope it does the same for others. I still revisit it - you can't say that about many lit crit creations.

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whats the deal, most of these poems don’t even rhyme

[Feliks · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pell-mell paper chase through the sprawling British & European intellectual and artistic landscape of the early 1900s. One of the most unusual historical compendiums you will ever encounter. Good luck trying to keep up with it. It's a big book; weighty; an extremely challenging mixture of molten elements to mix together and hammer out lines. A rich steel of ideas ricochets and sparks one from another, from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. Fireworks.

You really have to know your history to keep up with what's being described; Kenner bounds all over the aesthetic terrain of Ancient Greece; Rome; Ancient China--because the intellectual luminaries of London and Italy in early 1900 were enflamed with this heritage. Kenner's task is to gather it and convey it; the thought-currents of the Men of 1914. Multifarious, multivariate trends in aesthetics; philosophy; criticism, language, translation, economics; sociology--everything happening in a log-floe; zig-zagging, colliding, and careening off each other. And he pulls it off.

Kenner is not a well-known biographer (to most people these days) but he should be. And he is at his best with this kind of histo-lit-art survey. You will get to know all these lost figures of 1880-1930 --via his garrulous, rambunctious style--intimately, as from no other author. Kenner loves the anecdote; the quote; the gesture; and the minutiae of lives; he delivers up the quirks and idiosyncrasies in stalagtites and stalagmites. The personalities of those days, rear up and blaze away on his pages. You will meet Joyce, Yeats, TS Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Picasso, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams; plus sundry literary critics, translators, art collectors, publishers, editors, art dealers; art critics all yakking their heads off in those explosive times. Futurists, Vorticists, Cubists, Symbolists, Objectivisists, Positivists, Surrealists. Everybody.

But Kenner's fascination with famous intellects does not render him a mere gossip. He's no lightweight: he feverishly dissects the development of 1910's host of dynamic ideas; all the technical breakthroughs in poetry and prose; all the trends and spin-offs and offshoots; the controversies and debates and feuds and arguments.Circulation figures and press runs; not just the patronage and the receptions and showings.

In particular with this volume, the emphasis is on poetry and here, Kenner's passion and erudition comes to the fore. He pauses every few pages to discuss what Ezra Pound actually did. Line by line. Meters, syllables, stanzas, vowel-sounds; consonants and transcription and dialect. It's a poetry clinic. Astounding photos and drawings, as well.

Whole chapters are devoted to the history of western interpretation of Chinese ideograms for the purpose of understanding Chinese poetry (this was one of Pound's main drives). Even if you love poetry, you may be overwhelmed; if you are 'somewhat interested' in the history of poetry you may find it slightly tedious. If you actively dislike poetry, you may either toss the book down in disgust or simply flip ahead through these sections.

Naturally the book sifts exhaustively too, through every detail of Ezra Pound's career and growth as a poet and as a man. How his style formed; development by development. Every significant conversation; Pound's travels; what books Pound carried in his pocket; what passages Pound underlined; what he scribbled in his diaries; what he did at a party or exhibition; and how everything he did affected other symbolists and imagistes.

Overall: highly rewarding read. You really absorb some of the essence of that stupendous age, from this difficult reading experience. It's like standing under a waterfall of historical thought. Even if you have 'reservations' about Pound there's no denying that this American shaped his times. He was the epicenter of it all. You can't overlook him or neglect him; this book shows why.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The forces which produce the branch-angles of an oak lay potent in the acorn."
-Ernest Fenollosa

Kenner's own acorn is the chapter titled "The Cantos- 2."

Viz: "There is no substitute for critical tradition" a continuum of understanding, early commenced. Remy de Gourmont surmised that the Iliad discovered today in the ruins of Herculaneum 'would produce only some archeological sensations,' interesting exactly as is 'The Song of Roland,' illustrative of some vanished civilization. Precisely because William Blake's contemporaries did not know what to make of him, we do not know either, though critic after critic appeases our sense of obligation to his genius by reinventing him. Something analogous is true of Gerard Hopkins, of whom contemporary taste, except for a few correspondents, had no chance to make anything; consequently, it is more of an effort than it should be for us to make of him what we do. In the 1920s, on the other hand, something was immediately made of 'Ulysses' and 'The Waste Land,' and our comfort with both works after 50 years, including our ease at allowing for their age, seems derivable from the fact that they have never been ignored."

Indeed, the heft of this book (at just over 600 pages) is a product of the context that Kenner is obliged to put Pound and his work in to make something out of them. Pound himself sacrificed "direct" translation of meaning in translating poetic works in order to produce something that could be read without deference to footnote or annotation, something that would make sense in the moment of reading, but still yield to further examination. Kenner sees the passages of The Cantos which deal with the Pound's contemporary world as the most opaque, the most in need of annotation and explication, precisely because they miss this quality. So Kenner sets out to explicate and annotate, to fill in the blanks that time has created.

Of course, Pound himself left behind a great deal more Ars Poetica than Homer or the writer(s) of 'The Song of Roland,' but, as Kenner notes, Pound's writings often leave vital things out of the reckoning. Kenner's survey is wonderful at providing the branch angles here, as well. Where Pound has been maddeningly aphoristic, Kenner is willing to spend the time putting things in their right place and allowing them to stretch toward comprehension.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kenner wrote beautiful prose. He was erudite, he knew his field, and was not only willing to stick his neck out but eager to convert and convince. Reading Kenner reminds me that there was a time when Critics knew about books and had opinions they wanted to convey to readers in elegant and informative prose.

This reads at times more like a good story than the monumental work of criticism it is. At least one critic has said that it should really be called the Kenner Era. How much the creation of "Modernism" as a definable literary critical subject is due to his work is an interesting question.

Critical books should never be read in isolation so I suggest reading this with C.K Stead's "The New Poetic", John Harwood's marvelously critical "Eliot to Derrida" and after you've marveled at Kenner's reading of the famous two line metro poem you could read Michael Donaghy's impish demolition of the same reading in "The Shape of the Dance".

[Richard S · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry, there was barely anything in here for me, largely incomprehensible, never in the slightest enlightening. I was excited at first and as I thumbed through it, searching for nuggets of - frankly anything - I felt continually disappointed.

[jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

better than actually reading Ezra Pound, no offense

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

What didn't I learn from this book might be an easier question to answer.

[Alex Watt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible scope. Incredible erudition. Scholarship so good it made me horny.

[Cai]

I liked better the parts where he's not talking about Pound.

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a youth, Ezra Pound aspired to know everything that could be known about poetry. Nearly seven decades later, his lifework culminated in a last book, tellingly entitled Drafts and Fragments, and he wondered where he had gone wrong.
Hugh Kenner chronicles these decades in this thick book, weighty with bone and sinew. In the course of it, he makes a convincing case that his title, The Pound Era, is a fitting description of what passed for modern English literature when I went to college. Pound and his friends in pre-war London defined themselves, their movement, and their time as a vortex. It was a brief, transcendent moment. The major work of most of them still lay ahead but was carried out under a cloud of tragedy. The destruction of the Great War took the life of one of their number, Gaudier-Brzeska, and hurtled the survivors on parallel, lonely trajectories.
They (Joyce, Eliot, Williams, and the others) lived in a time when the newly-discovered cave paintings in southern France and the etymological turn in linguistics made them aware of the inheritance of eons. The gift of their intelligence was to make the past as vibrant as the present. Pound was at the forefront, blending modern idiom with Chinese ideograms, Provençal ballads, the Jefferson-Adams correspondence, and Homer. From beginning to end, Homer. And let's not forget the golden-clad goddess.
To read this magisterial book is an education. I learned many things, such as why the anthropologist Frobenius rejected a word in his own language, Zeitgeist, and used instead an ancient Greek work, paideuma, to express what he meant by a shared culture.
The Pound of the wartime radio broadcasts from Italy is neither excused nor trivialized. The reader is left to ponder what led him to such a quixotic mission, but Kenner supplies much of the background. Pound’s fascination with the economic theories of Douglas, for instance, seems understandable, as it becomes ever clearer that the dominant force in the world is avarice.
When I first discovered Pound a half-century ago, I was fascinated by his Imagist poems. I read and re-read them. I tried his Guide to Kulchur but gave up. And I assumed I was too dense even to attempt the Cantos. With Kenner to breathe courage into me, I just ordered them, and I’m impatient to give them a go.

[Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up to 4

I know "most unique" is grammatically incorrect, but grammar, is like fashion, and there are trends of what is acceptable and what is not which shift over time, so allow me to lapse into unfashionability: this book is maybe the most unique book I've ever read. The entire reading process was like watching someone else's dream. Kenner's phantasmagoric tale revolves around literary Modernism, specifically the Anglo-American strain, with Ezra Pound placed at the center of the vortex. The book itself is a sometimes jumbled amalgamation of literary history, biography, linguistics, translation studies, WWII history, art criticism, and close readings of The Cantos If this weren't difficult enough, Kenner's prose style is like no other; again, dreamlike, opaque, jesting, and written in that tone of authorial conviction and finality with which so many male scholars of the 20th century assumed. I think it's worth saying that I have an advanced degree in literature, specifically 20th c. American poetry (the very field that this book studies!) and I still found this book very difficult. With that tone of conviction I mentioned comes the attendant high supposition of knowledge on the reader's behalf. This is clearly not a book for laypeople and it is surprising that this book has the (slightly) broader readership that it does. Kenner drops names like pennies in a wishing well. Take this exemplary chunk which begins a subsection in a chapter on Symbolism:

Of certain Symbolist premises as well: the Symbolist willingness to life words out of "usage," free their affinities, permit them new combinations. Cydonian Spring, not Cydonian fruits which are quinces, and malides nymphs, not apples, apple-nymphs moreover, not the flock-nymphs of the Lexicon, and with an invented name, Maelids, which John Quinn in the American proofs of Lustra tried to correct to Meliads but Pound in Personae and in Canto III retained in the form he preferred, a word that ought to exist. (142)

I would love to close read this paragraph and decode its offhand gestures but I have neither the time nor space. Suffice to say, Kenner could have been more generous with his footnotes (not endnotes, of which there are plenty) and transparency. But, of course, that is not the goal of his book.

The tacit argument of his book, if it can be said there is one, is that Ezra Pound is the creator of literary Modernism in the West and also its most accomplished poet. The first claim, it should be said, is a biographical one. The second is an aesthetic one. I find the first to be far more plausible than the second. No amount of Kenner's laudatory adjectives can convince me that excerpts like this from The Cantos

Herr Bacher's father made Madonnas still in the tradition
carved wood as you might have found it in any cathedral
and another Bacher still cut intaglios
such as Salustio's in the time of Ixotta,
where the masks come from, in the Tirol,
in the winter season
searching every house to drive out the demons.

are really the peak of American poetry. It is easy to appreciate the dedication with which Pound applied his entire creative life to the creation of this long poem. It is not so easy to pick up a copy and enjoy it as poetry as such. Gatekeepers and tendentious types will argue the value is in that very fact. Kenner calls it a "poem including history" but it seems more apt to call it "history disguised as poetry."

There are moments of brilliance in The Cantos, particularly XLV on usura and LXXXI's galvanizing chant for all artists to pull down your vanity and enter your verse into the powerful play that goes on. (I will never be able to remove from my memory the line: "The ant's a centaur in his dragon world." Sheer brilliance, and Kenner does well to guide us towards Pound's returning ghosts of China in the dragon, Arnaut Daniel in the centaur, and 20th century America in the ant.) Kenner is at his best when he's highlighting Pound's incredible ability to manipulate rhythms and meters in his poems, which I find to be the most impressive aspect of Pound's craft, especially in his mistranslations of Chinese poetry. But as I continued on through Kenner's version of history, I was struck by the defensiveness with which he treated his subject. The way he infantilizes Eliot, sidelines Stevens, and acknowledges Williams, but only as a country doctor who got a few things right in verse, are all done in bad faith. As a student of poetry myself, I believe there is a stronger claim for Williams or Stevens having a longer lasting and stronger impact on American poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries than Pound. And indeed, the two chapters that focus on Williams are some of the best chapters in the entire book.

Certainly Pound's political beliefs didn't help canonize him the way Yeats slips easily on syllabi between Swinburne and Bishop. Kenner's obvious distaste for discussing Pound's antisemitism and ignorance of the Chinese language are shameful. The chapter on "The Cage" forces Kenner to discuss why, exactly, Pound was incarcerated and labeled an enemy of the state and he bungles his way through an apology for Pound's aging senility: "it is a pity Pound's distinction between the financiers and the rest of Jewry was not allowed to be emphasized while he was still in the habit of making it. Correctly or not, it attempted a diagnosis, and one tending rather to decrease than to encourage anti-Semitism" (465). Kenner had met with Pound and his wife multiple times in writing this book, and one feels here that the scholar's personal knowledge of his subject hinders his ability to be clearsighted.

Some highlights for me: the chapter on Wyndham Lewis, whose drawing of Timon of Athens blew me away. Make it new. Seeing Gaudier's feline sketches and hieratic head of Pound. The idea of "patterned energies," found in water, in trees, in poetry, in song, in cities, is an inspiring and open concept for artistic creation. The stunning architectural pictures in the chapter on "Sacred Places." And the end of Pound's lifework:

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luminous Details, then, are "patterned integrities" which transferred out of their context of origin retain their power to enlighten us. They have this power because, as men came to understand early in the 20th Century, all realities whatever are patterned energies. If mass is energy (Einstein), then all matter exemplifies knottings, the self-interference inhibiting radiant expansion at the speed of light. Like a slip-knot, a radioactive substance expends itself. Elsewhere patterns weave, unweave, reweave: light becomes leaf becomes coal becomes light. The universe (Fuller, 1967) "is the aggregate of non-simultaneous, only partially overlapping transformational events." Its rhythms, knowingly exploited, will support geodesic structures.

[J. Alfred · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kenner writes in a quirky, semi-poetic style that can grate on you for awhile, but once you realize he's pulling it off without any apparent affectation (sprezzatura!) one begins to love it. Also, this book is sort of a grab bag of literary criticism, biography (specifically of Pound) and cultural musings. It is spectacularly well done. If I write anything of this scholarly depth and literary grace in my life, I will be well pleased with myself as an academic.

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I put off reading this for years, Ezra Pound not seeming to me worth all those pages. I was wrong. Though Kenner didn't sell me on Pound necessarily, I am more appreciative.

[Des Bladet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another stone-cold masterpiece. It's turning into a good year for my relationship with book technology.

[Alfredo Suárez Palacios · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me ha llevado muchas idas y venidas pero este ensayo es una barbaridad. El conocimiento de toda una generación explicado y extendido para comprender las razones por las que veían el mundo y lo escribían de una forma concreta. Documentado, certero y profundo. Un ensayo de esos a los que volver a por certezas, datos curiosos y muchos análisis que enseñan a leer la poesía modernista inglesa desde una perspectiva que mezcla lo mejor de la biografía, con el análisis textual y métrico certero. Es total. Ir viendo como las diferentes concepciones teóricas, los avances científicos o las traducciones de los clásicos, dan forma a una generación que cambió las letras en inglés para siempre. Centrado en Pound pero no con menos Eliot, D.H. o Joyce, es uno de mis ensayos favs desde ya.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well shit. 99 percent of this book flew over my head. I loved the 1 percent I understood.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

😭

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stiff, elliptical, confounding, possibly evasive, a remarkable stream of metrical and thematic exegesis and a further knotting of the Pound conundrum...

[Ali Shehzad · Rating 5 out of 5]

they don’t make ‘em like this anymore

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some deep flaws, but also some utterly stunning prose and analysis.

[Sportsman · Rating 5 out of 5]

More so just a blanket endorsement of Kenner.

[Karim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gold standard for art criticism. The best prose in academic work.

[Connor Turk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top five books