Hugh Kenner and the Invention of Modernism

“Art,” quips Hugh Kenner in A Homemade World (1975) “lifts the saying out of the zone of things said.”1  The reference is to William Carlos Williams’s poems, such as “The Red Wheelbarrow,” that don’t seem to “say” anything profound and yet are brilliantly articulated.  It is a notion close to Wittgenstein’s adage “that a poem, although it is composed in the language of […]