The Pound Era

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The Pound Era

Hugh Kenner

Nonfiction

Jul 28, 2018

Even when it first came out in 1971, Hugh Kenner’s monumental key to the titanic age of literary modernism in the first half of the twentieth century had an air of elegy about it. Each page seemed to reassemble for the reader a portion of an elaborate mosaic that revealed the brilliance of an almost mythological constellation of writers. Kenner’s most striking revelations are about Ezra Pound, the figure he puts at the center of the creative generation that included James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and William Carlos Williams, among many other contemporaries, not to mention (poetic time being the most figurative of media) Sappho and Homer, Dante and Li Po. A difficult book, but a seductive one, it presumes an interest in its protagonists, and even some knowledge of their achievements; yet, since its themes—the evolution of language, the engendering of images, the life of story—are seminal to the making of meaning, the reach of The Pound Era is wide and its resonance deep.

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