Ezra Pound is best (or rather worst) remembered as a ranting propagandist for Mussolini's Fascists, which earned him a spell in the death cells and a decade in the loonybin. But he touched upon pretty much everything that mattered in Modernism; and, at his best, is matchless as a poet. Kenner's survey, taking in such diversities as Chinese ideograms and Buckminster Fuller, is among the best works of modern literary criticism: lucid, encyclopaedic, deft of tone and saturated with understanding of the period.