Book by book, Hugh Kenner has become one of the Big Names. The list of previous works facing the half-title of his newest critical study, A Sinking Island,[1] falls only a line or two short of overflowing the page; it contains the names of no fewer than twenty-one books published over the past forty years, from Paradox in Chesterton (1948) to The Mechanical Muse (1987). Among these, as his author’s note proudly indicates, are “two [books] on Ezra Pound, three on Joyce, two on Beckett, and one on T. S. Eliot.” In fact, though a few of his works venture beyond the territory denned by these famous names —witness the titles Geodesic Math and How to Use It and Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller—the bulk of Kenner’s oeuvre concerns itself with the modernist movement in literature. The back cover of the paperback edition of his most famous and highly praised tome, The Pound Era (1971), quotes a New York Times reviewer’s remark that “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 twentieth century in England.”
The Pound Era is indeed an admirable contribution to literary study.
The Pound Erais indeed an admirable contribution to literary study. Though as boisterously fragmentary in its form as The Cantos themselves, it is a
