Il écrit la poésie d'Ezra Pound(1951) à la suite de sa rencontre avec ce dernier, dans un hôpital en 1948. Devenus amis, Ezra Pound lui inspire le livre: The Rose in the Steel Dust. En 1950, il devient docteur èn littérature à l'Université Yale, grâce à James Joyce: Critique in Progress, qui deviendra en 1956,Dublin's Joyce. Il enseigne dans différentes universités prestigieuses: l'Université de Californie, à Santa Barbara; l'Université Johns Hopkins (de 1973 à 1990), et l'Université de Georgie (de 1990 à 1999). Il décède le .
Paradox in Chesterton (1947)
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Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guidebook (1954)
Dublin's Joyce (Indiana University Press, 1956; rpt., Columbia University Press, 1987)
Gnomon: Essays in Contemporary Literature (1959)
The Art of Poetry (L'Art de la Poésie) (1959)
The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (1959; rev. ed, 1969)
Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Grove Press, 1961; rev. ed., 1968)
T.S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays (editor) (Prentice-Hall, 1962)
The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett(1962) (illustrated by Guy Davenport)
Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Schools of Donne & Jonson (editor) (1964)
Studies in Change: À Book of the Short Story (editor) (1965)
The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (Indiana University Press, 1968; The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) (illustrated by Guy Davenport)
The Pound Era (University of California Press, 1971)
Bucky: À Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (William Morrow, 1973)
A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973)
A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975)
Geodesic Math and How to Use It (1976)
Ulysses (George Allen & Unwin, 1980; rev. ed., The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)
The Mechanic Muse (Oxford University Press, 1987)
A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983)
A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (1988)
Mazes: Essays (North Point Press, 1989)
Historical Fictions: Essays (University of Georgia Press, 1995)