It would seem impossible for a student of twentieth-century literature to lack familiarity with Hugh Kenner's criticism. He has put his hand to most of the major modern writers, defining their positions historically and offering unique perspectives on...

HUGH KENNER, detector and plotter of synergetic forces, pays great attention to encounters; let us begin with some. Thirty-six years ago he holed up in a cabin outside Peterborough, Ontario, and in two weeks wrote a book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (unfashionable...

THE MECHANIC MUSE, by Hugh Kenner. Oxford University Press. 136 pp. $13.95. Did you know that the latter half of the 19th century was "the golden age of ironware, when every thinkable human activity save perhaps the reproductive was being mapped onto machinery"?...