Kenner, Hugh (1923-2003)

The Making of the Modernist Canon [from Chicago Review]

1984

"Amid those visits and conversations a book to be called 'The Pound Era' first began to shimmer hazily in my mind."

In 1956, annus mirabilis, I visited Williams, Lewis, and Eliot, with introductions from Pound. He had told me that you have an obligation to visit the great men of our own time. Amid those visits and conversations a book to be called The Pound Era first began to shimmer hazily in my mind. Its typescript would not be complete for 13 years during which nothing stood still. Many were making the place of Ulysses clearer and clearer; Beckett was defining the trajectory of International Modernism; much attention to Pound was bringing one thing clearly into focus: that what he had always demanded was old-fashioned source-hunting scholarship, the very kind of thing the New Criticism had mad disreputable for a generation. Part of a canon is the state and history of the relevant criticism.
(p. 59)

Light::Shimmering

Reading

Kenner, Hugh. “The Making of the Modernist Canon” Chicago Review 34.2 (1984): 49–61.

01/06/2016