Carrol Cox wrote that this was "an unrevised and unexpanded printing of
Kenner's doctoral dissertation". Not so.  His 1950 Yale doctoral
dissertation became <Dublin's Joyce> (1956).

In "Retrospect: 1985", written as preface to the Bison Books Edition (U. of
Nebraska Press), Kenner said: "<The Poetry of Ezra Pound> was written in six
weeks, July-August 1949, by a graduate student ostensibly vacationing
between academic years directed toward other work."

He also wrote: "The scholarship of dedicated people on five continents has
obsolesced it in almost every particular."  He did not mention his own
<Pound Era> (1971), the work which above all the rest rendered it obsolete.

But in the1950s there was nothing that came anything near it as an attempt
to see <The Cantos> steadily and to see them whole.  It was a brilliant,
dazzling, exhilarating improvisation.  ("Lousy" is definitely not the word
for it.)

David Moody