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  • Questioning Minds:The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport
  • Edward M. Burns (bio)

Hugh Kenner (1923–2003) and Guy Davenport (1927–2005) met for the first time in 1953 when each gave a paper on Ezra Pound at Columbia University. The first extant letter is dated 25 June 1958 when Davenport wrote Kenner about a visit to William Carlos Williams. Between 1958 and 1994, they exchanged nearly one thousand letters. The letters are a record of their shared enthusiasms and a quarry for those interested in Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, and the American modernists, Williams, Moore, and Zukofsky.

Central to their letters is the importance each placed on the role of Ezra Pound in the vortex of literary modernism. Kenner first visited Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. in June 1948. After his release in 1958, and his return to Italy, Kenner would visit him in Venice and Rapallo. Davenport between 1952 and 1958 also made visits to St. Elizabeths, and like Kenner, he would see Pound in Italy. The letters are a record of their attempts to follow Pound’s intellectual journey and to see how he translated the “brutality of fact” and obscure information into The Cantos. They also offer the reader a glimpse into Pound’s complicated personal life through direct observation and through reports to them by friends of Pound.

These letters reveal the literary and artistic interests, and the personalities, of two very different people joined in a unique collaboration. Kenner dedicated his A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers to Davenport and Davenport dedicated his The Geography of the Imagination to Kenner. Read in their entirety, these letters form one [End Page 338] part of each writer’s intellectual autobiography; they record faithfully, and with candor, the urgency that each brought to his intellectual and creative pursuits.

Guy Davenport met William Carlos Williams when he visited Washington University where Davenport taught from 1953 to 1955. Both Kenner and Davenport had written about Williams for a special issue of Perspective published in 1953. Three of Kenner’s essays on Williams were collected in his Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature (1958). Kenner was one of the founders of Spectrum, a student literary journal at Santa Barbara College (now the University of California, Santa Barbara). In his letters, Kenner urges Davenport to complete his dissertation on Pound, being supervised by Harry Levin, so that he might apply for a position at Santa Barbara. Pound had been released from St. Elizabeths hospital in Washington, D.C., on 18 May 1958.

25 June 1958: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Hugh:

Good Lord yes! I got in last night—from New York, Paterson, and Rutherford in that order—and found your two-handed letter; I don’t think any nicer prospect has opened itself. Made me fair giddy. Dr Williams, Flossie, and Lee Lescaze and I fell to talking about you just day before yesterday: a concert of praise without qualification save some minor and intelligent ones from WCW who as a listener rather than a reader finds “the detail of it all too intricate” comfortably to follow. He told an heroic tale of how you removed Allen Tate’s head in public. […]

Somewhere in my desk is an unsent letter full of my excitement on reading Gnomon. I have followed Spectrum, too, and have been edging toward the decision to send them a poem that the HR [Hudson Review] kept 6 months and returned. No poet, I, I feel, but the desire to carve verse (if not vanity in that guise) visits me every other Tuesday. My [End Page 339] usual compromise is translation: I did 174 fragments of Archilochos last month for a termpaper, making the classics dept visibly nervous.

I jumped from rock to rock over the dry falls in Paterson, climbed to the park, and drank the tone of the gorge. Williams seemed terribly depressed with being an old man. Probably just post delivery melancholy after Paterson 5. Saw Ulysses in Nighttown in NY. Lordy! Zero Mostel catches an awful lot of Bloom, but the working up is a mess. […]

Sincerely, Guy

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