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

Product Information

It seems that a way with the suggestive fragment, the connective anecdote—“let the song lie in the thing! Among his five collections of poems are Flowers and Leaves (1966; 1991) and Thasos and Ohio: Poems and Translations, 1950–1980 (1986). To be sure, the critical prose instigated by Pound has its drawbacks—essentially peremptory, its salutary solicitousness of the unknown masterpiece, the obscured context, the neglected relation can become at times a hectoring of us ignorant barbarians—but on the whole I love it. The geography of the imagination would be a third construing of cultural divisions, showing, for instance, the areas of the portrait, the epic, the novel, the symphony.

In praise of the hand: A philosopher considers the crucial role of the hand in human evolution, particularly with respect to language. Many reviewers have noted that this is a master class of sorts; well, it is of a certain reading/poetic ideology. 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). Henry Award, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. In this collection, Guy Davenport serves as the reader's guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. And for all his suspicion of modernity, with its spewing cars and its squawking televisions, he also believed that it had furnished us with the resources to rescue ourselves. 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. Shifting perceptions of landscape from topographical features we encounter in space to milemarkers in whole though cannons, Davenport brings readers across bridges linking Olson, Pound, Greek myth, Joyce, traditional symbolism of the Angles, and the revival of Old Russian.

Forty essays on history, art, and literature from one of the most incisive, and most exhilarating, critical minds of the twentieth century. Before the internet, Google, and hyperlinks, Guy Davenport was the original polymath, perhaps the last great American polymath, who provided the links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present.Now, the Davenport with its 40 essays has lain there neglected for some years, browning with age like a slow cooking piece of toast.

Accuracy in such matters being impossible, we can say nevertheless that the brilliant experimental period in twentieth-century art was stopped short in 1916.Rumor had it that he was attracted to both men and women, but he never made any public declarations about his sexuality. Because of this collapse (which may yet prove to be a long interruption), the architectonic masters of our time have suffered critical neglect or abuse, and if admired are admired for anything but the structural innovations of the work. Davenport’s essay on Eudora Welty, I mean his fantasia on a theme of Eudora Welty, deserves a second look—or a third, or a fourth. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Unless he designates that a poem is a paraphrase of Latin, we miss it, Latin having dropped from classrooms.

In Pound’s spatial sense of time the past is here, now; its invisibility is our blindness, not its absence. 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. He speculates about the meaning of modernity, but he also recounts his heroic attempts to extinguish a flaming Jean-Paul Sartre (the famed existentialist had carelessly jammed a lighted pipe in his pocket) and his fruitless efforts to learn Old English from a professor who talked to his toes (the mumbler’s name was J.A pleasure of reading Davenport is his compression of any given matrix of affinities—the whole lit-crit trainspotting of influences on and influences of—into striking little scenes like that of Degas staying up all night with the Zoopraxia. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Their hair was curled with irons heated in an open fire, then oiled, then shoved into a bonnet it would tire a horse to wear. If the success of man as a political, companionable animal whose culture has thus far progressed to families living in cities, that achievement of humanity is dying, Joyce saw. The Geography of the Imagination is a book I often bring with me when I travel because no matter my mood, there’s usually an essay to suit it and because so many of the essays bear reading a third or even a fourth time.