In a review of Donald Gallup's Bibliography of Ezra Pound in 1965 Hugh Kenner said he had built his The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot 'on the facts ascertainable in Mr Gallup's Eliot bibliography', and that he now 'had some hope of making progress with a book called The Pound Era'. Anyone interested in how Kenner contrived not only to give definition to that era of literary modernism, but to establish Pound and Joyce as its leading writers, against the then prevailing view that it was 'the age of Eliot', will find in Willard Goodwin's Hugh Kenner: A Bibliography the indispensable guide-book. It maps the work of a brilliant, multi-faceted mind playing, as Guy Davenport puts it in his 'Foreword', 'over the most interesting and intricate creations of our time'.

Kenner's earliest listed publication was a full-length book, Paradox in Chesterton, published by Sheed and Ward in New York in 1947, with an introduction by Herbert Marshall McLuhan. Kenner must have written this while a student with McLuhan at the University of Toronto, before going on to graduate work at Yale. Over the summer vacation of 1949 he wrote the first significant study of Pound, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Faber, 1951). His 1950 Yale Ph. D. thesis, which became Dublin's Joyce (1956), was turned down by Faber, Harcourt Brace, Random House, and Princeton University Press among others, before being taken on by Chatto and Windus on the recommendation of C. Day Lewis. That meant that his fourth ...