Essays on twentieth-century poets Book

Eight literary critics, including such notables as Hugh Kenner and Wallace Fowlie, assess different aspects of Dante's work and its influence on such modernist writers as Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Beckett. This collection is useful as a guide to the different ways that Dante's presence manifests itself whether through allusion, imitation, or parody among others. Hugh Kenner's remarkable essay on Pound includes a good example of the type of observation that may be found throughout this collection: "For Pound he [Dante] is the supreme example of a poet who did what the very young Pound aspired to do: inherited, by diligence as much as by insight, all that was available for him to inherit and summarized much that need not ne summarized again."(pp 42-43)
Thus Pound studied the Troubadors just as Dante had done before him learning from them just like Dante. There are many gems among the essays in this collection.