Old Ez

By Charles Elliott

THE POUND ERA

byHUGH KENNER

606 pages. University of California.

$14.95.

The title itself seems presumptuous.

Can Kenner really be claiming that the era of such giants as Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence and Yeats belongs to Ezra Pound?

He can. He does. And he may even be right. At the back of every trend and tendency that mattered, anyway, he manages to find old Ez, puffing and prestidigitating-- language theories, borrowings from Greek, Italian and Provenc,al, imagism, myth and verses from the Chinese. Of course some of the connections are weak, and Kenner is not above a bit of crankery on his own. He often wears his learning like a lead flak jacket and, like Pound, can be pithy to the point of incomprehensibility. But he has a contagious gusto and a splendid ear: the fragments of Pound's poetry that litter his pages are altogether dazzling and rich, "an anthology of rightnesses." Kenner knows some good sto ries too. He has one small masterpiece about T.S. Eliot, during an impossibly British lunch, majestically bringing his famous critical faculties to bear upon a Cheese.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.