The Pound Era

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University of California Press, Sep 18, 1973 - Literary Criticism - 606 pages
"It is notoriously difficult to recognize degrees of pre-eminence among one's near-contemporaries. We talk now of the age of Donne, a label that would have seemed bizarre to Ben Johnson. Will The Pound Era seem an appropriate designation, 50 or 100 years hence, for the epoch we think of as 'modern'? Mr. Kenner's brilliantly written book establishes an excellent case for supposing the answer to be 'Yes.'"—The Economist

"Mr. Kenner's study...is not so much a book as a library, or better, a new kind of book in which biography, history, and the analysis of literature are so harmoniously articulated that every page has a narrative sense....The Pound Era is a book to be read and reread and studied. For the student of modern letters it is a treasure, for the general reader it is one of the most interesting books he will ever pick up in a lifetime of reading."—National Review
 

Contents

Ghosts and Benedictions
3
SpaceCraft
23
Renaissance II
32
The Muse in Tatters
54
Motz el Son
76
The Invention of Language
94
Words Set Free
121
Knot and Vortex
145
Douglas
301
The Sacred Places
318
The CantosI
349
O City City
382
Syntax in Rutherford
397
Specifics
407
The Cantos2
414
The Anonymous
437

Transformations
163
Imagism
173
The Invention of China
192
The Persistent East
223
Vortex Lewis
232
The Stone
248
Privacies
263
Scatter
279
Mao or Presumption
289
Inventing Confucius
445
The Cage
460
The Last European
496
The Jersey Paideuma
506
The Last Vortex
518
Endings
537
NOTES
563
INDEX
593
Copyright

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About the author (1973)

Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) was one of America's great literary critics. He wrote on a range of subjects that includes Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and geodesic domes.

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