The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78): 10 (Nonpareil Books, 10)

Product Information

He had such deep knowledge on so many subjects, he could point the reader down a dozen paths that might be interesting. Muybridge’s photographs, the monumental Zoopraxia, kept Degas and Messonier up all night looking at it.

Henry Award for short stories, the 1981 Morton Douwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and translation awards from PEN and the Academy of American Poets. I wish every English teacher read this book and shared the insights with their students -- hopefully with shades of enthusiasm and passion like Guy Davenport. It's not a profound observation in itself, but in his hands he showcases the variety of subtleties that each translator employs in his spin on the language of the original. Now, the Davenport with its 40 essays has lain there neglected for some years, browning with age like a slow cooking piece of toast.He's especially enamored of homegrown and largely self-educated American oddballs (the above three standing out as remarkable examples, along with Pound, Whitman, Melville, etc. While Davenport confesses to subsisting often on fried bologna, canned soup and candy bars, his reclusive career is one to be celebrated. A kind of Kentucky Sir Thomas Browne, he is a fascinated collector of marvels, an antiquarian but also a modernist, a curious imaginer, an omnivorous swallower of all traditions who is always boldly creating his own—nothing less than a ‘geography’ that might stretch from ‘the shores of the Mediterranean all the way to Iowa. My only prior exposure was “Some Verses of Virgil,” the novella that closes his collection Eclogues.

The early interpreters of The Cantos tended to see the poem as a study of the man of willed and directed action, as a persona of Odysseus. He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, 'a perfect balance of spirit and information. Kate Colby's sixth book is a personal ars poetica that looks back on her previous work and asks what she meant to say, what she keeps meaning to, and how to mean more.They do not declare themselves partisans of any school or genre; they do not instruct us in how to read them. Instead of sticking to one line of argument, they meander off into mazes and pause to ponder cul-de-sacs. He was probably best known as a champion of modernism — as the sophisticate behind early essays on Ezra Pound and one of the first theses on James Joyce, which he submitted as the culmination of his Rhodes scholarship in 1949. Davenport's apprenticeship of Pound served him well: his essays are prose ideograms- a succession of images in rapid cuts. There is no doubt that his restlessly polymathic stories, essays and stories-cum-essays are an acquired taste (albeit one that everyone should strive to acquire).

It was Pound’s determination to obliterate such a configuration of time and history, to treat what had become a world of ghosts as a world eternally present. Accuracy in such matters being impossible, we can say nevertheless that the brilliant experimental period in twentieth-century art was stopped short in 1916. If reality can be pictured in words, words must be seen as a set of essences in parallel series to the world.Not for stuffy lowbrow Goodreads shitbird-types who pout about an author being smart and challenging. The Greek says "of Odysseus the loved son," and Professor Lattimore translates "the dear son of Odysseus. Except for individual talents, already in development before 1916, moving on to full maturity, the century was over in its sixteenth year. While discussing Stanley Burnshaw's 'The Seamless Web', Guy Davenport summed up exactly how I felt after reading 'The Geography of the Imagination'. Extremely important in terms of statement of Davenport's aesthetics, a very personal essay, should be read in tandem with Barth's The Self in Fiction.