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“... Grammar could once seem synonymous with all learning, including magic and astrology; hence French grimoire (book of spells) and English glamour. But as early as the 14th century its OED sense 1.a had emerged: That department of the study of a language which deals with its inflexional forms, or other means of indicating the relations of words in the sentence, and with the rules for deploying these in accordance with established usage: usually also the department which deals with the phonetic system of the language and the principles of its representation in writing ...”

“... degree to which the piece of recall failed to affect the novel in any way. Amis is mentioned in Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island – which is to say that like Hughes and Heaney his name appears briefly without discussion (Larkin himself gets a dismissive page or two); and they all feature as examples of what happens to a culture when it gives way to ...”

“... Written when Zukofsky was being showered with praise for the impenetrable portions of his work. Hugh Kenner, the distinguished critic, wrote that it would take a generation to plumb its ...”

“... Hugh Kenner’s lively Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings belongs to the ‘Portraits of American Genius’ series launched two years ago by the University of California Press with the intention of celebrating American creativity. Books about Toni Morrison and Miles Davis will strike no one as unusual, although the volumes on Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, and Mabel McKay, a native American medicine woman, were less conventional ...”

“... of the period have been resorting to more oblique procedures. In 1968, in The Counterfeiters, Hugh Kenner turned 18th-century ideas into systems, and derived a comedy of entrapment from the spectacle of men coping somehow with systems designed to suit other people. Install a man in an ill-fitting system, and you may witness that discrepancy between ...”

“... precedent of Pound. And, second, there were a few devoted but enormously able scholars, notably Hugh Kenner, but also (and strangely, considering his origins in the neo-Augustan ‘Movement’ of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more ...”

“... unfair – was A Sinking Island (1987) by another chip-shouldering excolonial, the Canadian Hugh Kenner. Crawford doesn’t like Kenner’s book: naturally not, since Kenner, convicting the whole insula of insularity, conspicuously doesn’t exonerate any Scots from the ...”

“... Pound’s Selected Letters, mistakenly translated the date as 24 December. His error was noted by Hugh Kenner in 1973, but his correction escaped Valerie Eliot’s attention, and she repeated the mistaken date in the first edition of 1988. Only now is the letter finally assigned to 24 January 1922. Corrections to the dates of subsequent letters are also ...”

“... the two languages, the available rhetorics. I have been reading The Crane Bag in association with Hugh Kenner’s new book, A Colder Eye, a study of the modern Irish writers from Yeats, Joyce and Synge to Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Kenner encourages his reader, an American apparently, to believe that Ireland is a ...”

“... poems could only be approached biographically. Comparing Crane’s ‘epics’ with Zukofsky’s, Hugh Kenner wrote, in his once canonical The Pound Era: ‘The Bridge yields only to nutcrackers, “A” to reading.’ There was certainly something that Crane’s poems wouldn’t let you do to them. Crane produced two prodigious books of poetry, White ...”

“... In its current issue Scripsi prints a sprightly but essentially rancorous piece by the Canadian Hugh Kenner on the subject of British poetry, post World War Two. Not a very big subject, in Kenner’s view, since the whole thing stopped with Charles Tomlinson and Basil Bunting and is only spuriously ‘kept ...”

“... coming to terms with her own death. When they work, such effects are the poetic equivalent of what Hugh Kenner identifies in Joyce’s prose as ‘the Uncle Charles Principle’, named after the Uncle Charles in Ulysses who gets banished to the outhouse to smoke his pipe: ‘Every morning, therefore, Uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before ...”

“... no new facts have come to light to alter the picture. A better idea might be to follow the lead of Hugh Kenner, as Donald Howard is now doing, writing an account not of Chaucer but of the Chaucer era, ‘an X-ray moving picture of how our epoch was created from the medieval’, as he puts it, echoing Kenner on Pound. To ...”

“... the puppetmaster and assert: ‘This is how I think.’ This is Self’s way of dealing with what Hugh Kenner called the ‘Uncle Charles Principle’. Wyndham Lewis criticised Joyce for describing Uncle Charles ‘repairing’ to his outhouse in A Portrait of the Artist, arguing that ‘people repair to places in works of fiction of the humblest ...”

“... this fragmentary jumble of thoughts, images, sensations and memories, rammed together in a style Hugh Kenner called ‘unmortared’, Joyce came close to inventing a language that seemed to contain the mind’s endless restlessness.Lucy Ellmann’s new novel, Ducks, Newburyport, does not, despite the claims of some reviewers, consist of a single ...”