Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era: FAQ
April 11, 2023
What is The Pound Era about? “How our epoch was extricated from the fin de siècle.” A circle of writers and artists with Ezra Pound at its center: James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot. “They were born within a six-year span,” Kenner observes. How poems are made and how they work. How scholarship leads to new ways of seeing: Ernest Fenollosa’s ideogram, C.H. Douglas’s A+B theorem, Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations: “For Joyce’s was the archaeologist’s Homer.” The impact of World War I. The potential of vorticism, the tragedy of vorticism. Defending Pound.
