Mazes
Kenner, Hugh
rr he great literary critics are them-1 selves great prose writers, a fact that upon reflection should come as no surprise. One thinks of Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F....
...The Kenner style is capable again and again of exceptional eloquence...
...Nixon is one of the funniest things ever written...
...In its own way it is Poundian...
...The edges of the words connect in new ways...
...Unlike Homer or Allen Ginsberg, Mr...
...Ike, 'driven to the edge, almost, of a thought,' the Keystone Caesar and our last funny president...
...Remember Sputnik...
...I have been one way one time one way another...
...As bonfires glowed round the base of a cartoonist's Washington Monument, the wino in the foreground confided, "It'll never get off the ground...
...CLASSICS ON TAPE P.O...
...Stark, terse, hard-bitten, cunningly disequilibrated—tiptoe, in fact, on the needlepoint of our century's anguish—these poems speak to and for the thwarted Tamburlaine that lurks in the psyche of urban America...
...Box 969 Ashland, Oregon 97520 For FREE CATALOG, Call 1 (800) 729-2665 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 47...
...Nixon's first book of poetry...
...I don't know...
...Its sentence by sentence freshness commands your alert attention...
...She died in mid-December 1973, having outlived her husband six weeks more than a year...
...Like Pound's verse, Kenner's prose obliges the reader to slow down, take notice, think again...
...But Shakespeare had the "power to invest the air with forms...
...Davenport knows that Mark Antony's fleet was built in the city of Nice...
...Kenner's hoax review of a book called The Poetry of Richard Milhous...
...When an age goes, our way to understand it goes with it...
...And there is much more reading of the iconography of this famous but until now unknown painting, with Kenner delighting in the act of seeing brought about by Davenport...
...None of us really wants to be seen playing tennis against Ellsworth Vines...
...Will she have a biography...
...A cognitive Black Hole...
...After Mussolini had removed Haile and abolished slavery...
...Kenner "reviews" this "verse": "Here are no sonnets for an idle hour...
...And there is also much serious literary criticism...
...As Lionel Trilling once wrote in connection with Santayana, "That smile of Parmenides made me think...
...No more, possibly, than Homer's Helen...
...Q ome of the funniest things I have ever read are in this book...
...That chorus was for me.' He had so inscribed it, having typed it in the evening in Pisa on the medic's typewriter...
...with his wife Pat.' " (This last must be a joke about the legend of Wallace Stevens, "insurance executive, Hartford...
...MAZES Hugh Kenner/North Point Press/320 pp...
...A time has gone with her...
...On every front—ecology, government, Russia, Raquel Welch—we face both ways while poet Nixon speaks for all of us...
...Stowe's famous elevenkleenex tract" (referring to Uncle Tom's Cabin...
...I will mention here his huge achievement, The Pound Era, not to talk about it directly now but as a way to begin talking about Kenner's style...
...Irony, that catless grin, does hover these days...
...Kenner shows that much in the book rests upon a foundation of, new term, "Irish Facts," which means Dublin inventions, or, in someone else's word, factoids...
...For a while nothing Western seemed to get off the ground...
...Davenport informs us that "classical ships never left sight of land, and could smell orchards on shore...
...Kenner celebrates, for example, a sensibility somewhat kindred to his own in a remarkable review of Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination (1981), a book which I have just picked up the phone to order...
...If it was the Pound Era, for example, it was also the Eliot Era...
...Chesterton • James Burnham • Frederick Hayek • Charles Murray & scores of others...
...The words he uses are almost always familiar ones, but he uses them in a new way...
...Such a repossession of the world must have been very much in the air in the 1920s, the Pound Era, as when John Crowe Ransom set himself the task of recognizing the "world's body" as over against Hegelian Oxford's Weltgeist, even as the young Hemingway was writing such sentences as "In the bed of the river there were pebbles and Jeffrey Hart's latest book is Acts of Recovery: Essays on Culture and Politics (University Press of New England...
...Well, wonder no more...
...Nixon, a civil servant, is content to reside 'in Washington, D.C...
...and Kenner knows precisely why: And truly, in 1950, certain things seemed altogether clear...
...Kenner: At Cape Canaveral our Germans rushed onto the pad a grapefruit-sized satellite atop a Viking rocket...
...Kenner concludes this delicious "review": Who the hell are they after...
...Did you wonder about Poe's phrase, the "perfumed sea...
...Here is no footloose vagrant, no sandalled unshaven bum...
...Old certainties dissolve...
...Make It New, Pound wrote, and Kenner does so...
...Among many other things, this book is, to coin a phrase, a stitch...
...Neither Pound's nor Kenner's style is by any means exclusively about "things" in a literal sense, but both styles make ideas have the kinetic quality of things...
...Much that is delivered at the Modem Language Association is just as funny, though unintentionally so...
...She is a product of the ages, this modest Iowa farm wife: she has the hairdo of a medieval madonna, a Reformation collar, a Greek Cameo, a nineteenth-century pinafore...
...Martin Luther put her a step behind her husband...
...22.95 Jeffrey Hart BOOKS ON CASSETTES Featuring: The Conservative Classics &".' Unabridged Recordings &s.' Purchase or 30 Day Rental &e.' Columnist George Will has stated, "I go through a book .a week using time otherwise wasted in taxis, walking and shaving:' (NY Times) Books by: • Paul Johnson • George Gilder • Thomas Sowell • Milton Friedman • Russell Kirk • Solzhenitsyn • Wm...
...John Knox squared her shoulders...
...Dorothy Pound's "hand turning pages pauses at the lynx-chorus in Canto 79...
...Make no mistake, ours are not easy times...
...Of the enormous amount of writing on George Orwell, Kenner's essay, "The Politics of the Plain Style," is quite simply the best (and I am well aware, for example, of Trilling's essay...
...When you listen to even one of their sentences you enter distinctive worlds of the sensibility...
...In the process of reintroducing living speech, Eliot had made a seventeenth-century manner accessible, and Donnes way, Marvell's way, shored up the procedures of substantial second-level poets like Tate and Ransom...
...the stock-market crash of 1929 put that look in her eyes...
...We have lain here amid kalicanthus and sword-flower The heliads are caught in wild rose-vine The smell of pine mingles with rose leaves .. . O lynx, be many of spotted fur and sharp ears...
...Hugh Kenner is among the absolutely first-rate literary critics adduced above...
...It fell over the instant Mission Control lit the match: "IKE'S SPUTNIK FLOPNIK...
...I don't know...
...This reviewer's own prose falls silent after such things...
...F. Buckley • Malcolm Muggeridge • G.K...
...The book is highly "readable," but you cannot read it quickly...
...Mazes is a collection of now suddenly no longer fugitive pieces, book reviews, talks, essays, obituaries, the whole held together—like the Cantos by the distinctive style that is the expression of Kenner's distinctive intelligence...
...Face to face with such quiet mastery, one is startled to learn from the jacket that this is Mr...
...Nixon's" poetry consists of quotations from the Watergate transcripts, placed in pseudo-poetic lines, and surrounded by commentary that burlesques academic criticism, as in: Mixed Emotions I still have mixed emotions on it...
...not big, but, you see, superior technology...
...One thinks of Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, and, a close call but making it, Edmund Wilson...
...boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels...
...There was a major poet living, T. S. Eliot, who had recently finished his major poem, "Four Quartets," and Eliot had created not only a body of work but a milieu...
...The rest is reminiscent fragment and fiction...
...Everyone "knows" Grant Wood's famous painting "American Gothic...
...Did you wonder about Poe's "Nicean barks of yore...
...O lynx, have your eyes gone yellow, with spotted fur and sharp ears...
...I don't suppose the late Richard Ellman thought Kenner's treatment of his "definitive" Joyce biography funny at all, but the rest of us will find it hilarious...
...Mrs...
...They are after us...
...No canvas-climber of Drake's" knew that he was living in the Age of Shakespeare...
...Recall that Dante, near the beginning of his poem, greeted the shades of the five greatest classical writers, and then said, "And I was a sixth among them...
...Only everyone doesn't know it...
...As in the Cantos at their best, each word as it comes along is new...
Vol. 23 • January 1990 • No. 1
