I was lucky enough to study under him for two semesters at UGA as an undergraduate. One semester we went through Joyce’s *Ulysses *page by page. (He didn’t use notes; he didn’t need them.) The second class was on the works of T.S. Eliot. Eliot and Kenner were friends; Kenner referred to Eliot as “Tom.”
He was one of the most blindingly brilliant critics, writers, or people in general I’ve ever encountered, not to mention he was funny as hell. He was a major role model for me in many ways.
He was 80, so we can’t be too surprised, but it’s still a downer. The world is far less cool without him.
Sad to see that generation pass away; they don’t seem to have been replaced by another of the same stature. I’m thinking of guys like Louis Martz, Richard Ellman, Frank Kermode, Walter Jackson Bate, David Perkins, Marjorie Perloff, etc. They were the giants of the field back in my days as an English major. (I ended up in Atlanta when I entered the Ph.D. program in English lit at Emory, planning to work with Richard Ellman for my dissertation. Sadly, Professor Ellman was diagnosed with ALS a couple of weeks after I accepted Emory’s offer, and he died the next year without ever returning to Emory from Atlanta).