The Pound Era

Rating:
Summary: Writing on Pound worth the grapple
Review: I come back to this book again and again. It combines a historical survey of the Modernist period with one of the best readings of Ezra Pound I've come across. And Kenner's own style is insurpassable for his subject.

An essential read for anyone interested in the period and its writers. And a book that will change the way you read and feel about poetry. Just wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: Writing on Pound worth the grapple
Review: I should say that I'm only 200 pages into this book, but I simply wanted to relate how steady it has been to now in its blend of chronicle, elucidation, and detail. Particularly impressive is how Kenner uses an often very dense (Jamesian, Pound-ish) style of commentary to achieve this. I glanced through a copy of his selected essays ('Historical Fictions') and was disappointed to see that in them it often fell flat, whereas here it flows. Strong works of criticism often seem to fail with first intrusion of any flourishings of "style". I think that part of the revelation of Eliot the critic was his careful push away from a certain weightiness of thought while retaining depth and the critic's persona (which until then might have been all the rage, but for Eliot must have been a conscious decision, and is all the better for it in contrast with many of the zigzagging claims and stances that have come in the interim since). In critique it is the thinking that counts.

Pound oozes style, but his thought is what breaks the waves.

There is a sentence that one doesn't know what to do with. Does it express what it should? It is mine and I would say it needs to be modified. This is a 500 page book and it has had lapses so far. But like Pound's poetics, the stretching into the peripherals of Kenner's way of writing wins dividends and he wanders into prose critical summations complete with all the strength of good poetry.

The "Era" of the title tells you that this is also a book of people and the events around them, and Kenner paints the literary picture in continuously brief and slightly worn strokes. Here he can sometimes get a little misty, perhaps even dewy. A wide range of references will tend to rush away from the events given the slightest notice. But this is Pound's era, and how else are we to see the man? I shall read on and discover.

Rating:
Summary: Pound Lives
Review: Not so much an argument, as a demonstration of Pound's panoramic influence on Modernism, Kenner's book remains one of the most highly praised exemplars of American literary criticism. Conveying as much biography as analysis-and even more cultural history, Kenner's sui generis study leaps from topic to tale to close reading, with little effort at transition, in an angular act of synthesis that demands acts of cultural leap-frogging much like Pound's own Cantos (though mercifully less strenuous). Kenner offers suggestive accounts not only of Pound and Modernism, but of the liberating role of Chinese poetry, translation, Greek syntax, history and economics, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Henry James, Williams, and the Objectivists. Kenner himself savvily refrains from attempting to define "a Pound tradition," because he needn't. Pound himself was-famously-the most important literary taxonomist and canon-maker of American modernism; and this book, with its convincing accounts of the almost servile fawnings paid to Pound by the high modernists, shows why Pound was so central: he was at once the most advanced and deeply traditional literary reader of his era. Kenner shows how for Pound, "all poets were contemporaneous," and though few could claim his readerly breadth, Pound's eclectic cultural borrowings (or should I say thefts) expanded the palette to include influences with which recent avant-gardists are only beginning to reckon. Indeed most of Pound's influence has been simplified to his emphasis on the desired objectivity of poetic language, or, as Williams redefined it, to the notion that a poem is "a machine made out of words." Shared by the Objectivists, and, more complexly, by the Language Poets, this linguistic outlook has become one of the crucial trends in experimental poetics.

Rating:
Summary: A great work of lit. criticism with a pinch of history
Review: This is an impressive read. I came to it at just the right time in my life. I had been reading the poems of Marianne Moore and Buckminster Fuller as well as studying Ancient Greek. This is a dense but ultimately very rewarding book. It incorporates passages of troubadour lyric and Greek and name-drops a lot of historical characters with which you may or may not be familiar. For those interested in Pound and his times, I highly recommend it. For those unsure, check out the excerpts that Amazon provides. This is not everyone's cup of tea. But, as I said, I came to this at the right time in my life.

Rating:
Summary: A great work of lit. criticism with a pinch of history
Review: This is an impressive read. I came to it at just the right time in my life. I had been reading the poems of Marianne Moore and Buckminster Fuller as well as studying Ancient Greek. This is a dense but ultimately very rewarding book. It incorporates passages of troubadour lyric and Greek and name-drops a lot of historical characters with which you may or may not be familiar. For those interested in Pound and his times, I highly recommend it. For those unsure, check out the excerpts that Amazon provides. This is not everyone's cup of tea. But, as I said, I came to this at the right time in my life.