Hugh Kenner

William Hugh Kenner (January 7, 1923 – November 24, 2003) was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. His studies on Modernist literature often analyzed the work of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. His major study of the period, The Pound Era, argued for Pound as the central figure of Modernism, and is considered one of the most important works on the topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Kenner

• Attending the University of Toronto, Kenner studied under Marshall McLuhan, who wrote the introduction to Kenner's first book Paradox in Chesterton, about G. K. Chesterton's works. Kenner's second book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) was dedicated to McLuhan, who had introduced Kenner to Pound on June 4, 1948, during Pound's incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC, where Kenner and McLuhan had driven as a detour from their trip from Toronto to New Haven, Connecticut. (Pound, who became a friend of Kenner's, had suggested the book be titled The Rose in the Steel Dust.) Later, Kenner said of McLuhan, "I had the advantage of being exposed to Marshall when he was at his most creative, and then of getting to the far end of the continent shortly afterward, when he couldn't get me on the phone all the time. He could be awfully controlling."[2] Later, when McLuhan wrote that the development of cartography during the Renaissance created a geographical sense that had never previously existed, Kenner sent him a postcard reading in full: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, Yours, Hugh."