Izenberg talks about Hugh Kenner and the visit as method. Most retrospectives on Kenner's career at some point mention the devoted thoroughness with which Kenner obeyed Ezra Pound's injunction: "You have an obligation to visit the great men of your own time." Kenner's life-long devotion to Modernism springs out of the 1948 visit with Pound at St. Elizabeth's in which the injunction was uttered--as does, perhaps, his magnum opus, The Pound Era. Indeed, Kenner seems to have elevated the visit into something like a method. Not without cause, Kenner's Modernism has been understood as a celebration of the great man theory of modernism, of an artistic era shaped by close-up encounters with powerful imaginations and their consequential doings.