By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 26, 2003; Page B07

Hugh Kenner, 80, a revered scholar who championed literary modernism, which broke with expressive styles of the past, and the idea that high-minded academic terrain did not have to be dry, died Nov. 24 at his home in Athens, Ga. He had heart ailments.

Dr. Kenner achieved his greatest recognition for books about Ezra Pound and James Joyce, but he also was regarded as a keen interpreter of T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Reviewers noted that his work was heightened by accessibility and lack of jargon, even when the subjects themselves were ferociously difficult. The author's sympathy for his subjects, and in many cases his friendship with them, allowed him to study those writers on their own terms.

"Kenner gives literary criticism a good name," a Chicago Tribune reviewer wrote about Dr. Kenner's "The Mechanic Muse" (1987), a series of lectures on his favorite writers.

Dr. Kenner was fascinated by the modern world's impact on particular writers and how its technological marvels lent inspiration to literature. How else to explain, he wrote, the quickening pulse of the prose, its altered perception of time, and the inclusion of clocks and phones and other gadgetry as poetic images?

His most important early work was "The Poetry of Ezra Pound" (1951), which was credited with bringing new attention to the poetry of Pound, whose reputation suffered during World War II for his anti-American and anti-Semitic radio broadcasts from Italy. Charged with treason, he was found mentally unfit to stand trial and hospitalized at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington for years.

Dr. Kenner visited Pound in the psychiatric hospital and said he learned from him the value of simple writing. Pound also advised his young visitor to meet the great men of his era, which to Dr. Kenner meant Eliot, Beckett, William F. Buckley Jr. and others. Pound's suggestions distinguished Dr. Kenner's books with their firsthand observations, including the praised volume "The Pound Era" (1971).

Dr. Kenner solidified his reputation as a Joyce scholar with "Dublin's Joyce" (1955), "Joyce's Voices" (1978) and "Ulysses" (1980), a study of the legendarily difficult work of the same title. He wrote dozens of other books, studies of such diverse subjects as polymath R. Buckminster Fuller and the cartoons of animator Chuck Jones.

William Hugh Kenner was a native of Peterborough, Ontario. He said an early childhood memory was having his father, a high school principal, read to him while underscoring every word with his finger.

He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that a hearing impairment from childhood, the result of influenza, led to a further love of literature because conversation could be cumbersome.

"What kept me going for a long time on was my ability to read," he said. "When I got to the University of Toronto, I was almost totally deaf, but I had read almost the entire English curriculum." (He added that in the 1970s, when he faced some derision at conferences for his lack of scholarly attention to female writers, he liked to turn off his hearing aid.)

He was a 1945 graduate of the University of Toronto, where he also received a master's degree in English. Marshall McLuhan, the communications scholar, had been one of his instructors and wrote the introduction to Dr. Kenner's first book, "Paradox in Chesterton" (1947). McLuhan also persuaded the young student to pursue a doctorate, which he got in English literature from Yale University in 1950.

He taught at what is now the University of California at Santa Barbara before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 1973. He spent 17 years at Hopkins and finished his academic career, in 1999, at the University of Georgia.

He was said to have demanded in the classroom the same rigorous thinking and simple expression that was the hallmark of his best works. Avoid lofty expositions about "genres" and the like, he said. Instead, he might ask his students, what does the first line of a poem tell you?

A Washington Post reporter visiting him at Hopkins in 1978 wrote: "Sometimes a fellow would pronounce a high thought that did not seem to mean doodly beans and Kenner would gently lasso him. The student would then have to think what he meant, if anything, and say it in plain words. Usually fine abstractions collapse if forced into a paraphrase, and they did that day."

His first wife, Mary Josephine Waite Kenner, whom he married in 1947, died in 1964.

Survivors include his wife, the former Mary Anne Bittner, whom he married in 1965, of Athens; five children from his first marriage; and two children from his second marriage.