"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

This pioneering study did much to rehabilitate Ezra Pound's reputation after a long period of critical hostility and neglect. Published in 1951, it was the first comprehensive examination of the Cantos and other major works that would strongly influence the course of contemporary poetry.

"Hugh 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 20th century in England. Author of pervious studies of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pound (to name a few), Kenner bestrides modern literature if not like a colossus then at least a presence of formidable proportions. A new book by him is certainly an event....A demanding, enticing book that glitters at the same time it antagonizes...."The Pound Era presents us with an idiosyncratic but sharply etched skeletal view of our immediate literary heritage."—The New York Times

From 18th-century Grand Tours to today's planet-wide Internet journeys, this book is a fascinating exploration of man's desire for knowledge and the inevitable quest for an elsewhere that results.

This volume offers new interpretations of Pound's poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally. It covers Pound's work from his beginnings as a young poet in Philadelphia in the first decade of the century through his most productive years as a poet, critic, and translator to the first critical treatments of his work in the 1940s and 50s, and on to translations of The Cantos spanning the last fifty years.

"The most intellectually exhilarating work published in 2018 . . . A lasting treasure." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Hugh Kenner (1923–2003) and Guy Davenport (1927–2005) first met in September 1953 when each gave a paper on Ezra Pound at Columbia University. They met again in the fall of 1957, and their correspondence begins with Kenner's letter of March 7, 1958. In the next forty–four years, they exchanged over one thousand letters. An extraordinary document of a literary friendship that lasted half a century, the letters represent one of the great and—with the dawn of the age of text and Twitter—one of the last major epistolary exchanges of its kind. Students and lovers of modernism will find, in the letters, matchless engagements with Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Stan Brakhage, Jonathan Williams, and the American modernists William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Louis Zukofsky. The correspondence ends with Kenner's letter of August 9, 2002, lamenting how they had drifted apart. The extensive notes and cross–referencing of archival sources in Questioning Minds are a major contribution to the study of literary modernism. The letters contained within explore how new works were conceived and developed by both writers. They record faithfully, and with candor, the urgency that each brought to his intellectual and creative pursuits. Here is a singular opportunity to follow the development of their unique fictions and essays.