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

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Consider your own geographical imagination of China and note down a few adjectives and descriptions. Now consider the images taken on the GA Study Tours to China. Pound's poetry was very new and very old at once. The man seemed to live deep in history and yet he was the present for writers alive with the idea of being modern. Even now Pound's genius for the ancient and the modern together has not been generally grasped. Our ignorance of the past blinds us to his finest accomplishments. Unless he designates that a poem is a paraphrase of Latin, we miss it, Latin having dropped from classrooms. Nor is it a settled matter that Pound is a master poet. The great paradox which Mr. Kenner must struggle with in this first full-scale study of Pound and his era is that Pound was the first to arrive in the modern renaissance, and his reputation will be the last to arrive in its proper place in the world's opinion." He also argues ‘understanding children requires an appreciation of their place experience and environmental and social awareness’. Many of you have done similar activities to the ones described above. In a crowded curriculum you may find it hard to justify the time that these activities take, but you should bear in mind that some research suggests these types of activities help to raise the standard of learning in geography classrooms. The words are as magic as Keats, but what is the sense? Sappho, whom Poe is imitating, had compared a woman's beauty to a fleet of ships. Byron had previously written lines that Poe outbyrons Byron with, in "the glory that was Greece I And the grandeur that was Rome." But how is Helen also Psyche; who is the wanderer coming home? Scholars are not sure. In fact, the poem is not easy to defend against the strictures of critics. We can point out that Nicaean is not, as has been charged, a pretty bit of gibberish, but the adjective for the city of Nice, where a major shipworks was: Marc Antony's fleet was built there. We can de­ fend perfumed sea, which has been called silly, by noting that classical ships never left sight of land, and could smell orchards on shore, that perfumed oil was an extensive industry in classical times and that ships laden with it would smell better than your shipload of sheep. Poe is nor­ mally far more exact than he is given credit for. That window-niche, however, slipped in from Northern Europe; it is Gothic, a slight tone of the grotto in this almost wholly classical poem.

Ernst Machs Max Ernst: the closing essay. 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. How Gassian these lines sound! —"...admit that stories are made of words: writing. Far from wanting a word to be invisible, unassertive, the makeshift vehicle for something else ("idea," "thought"), I want every word to be wholly, thoroughly a word. If reality can be pictured in words, words must be seen as a set of essences in parallel series to the world." Davenport was a classicist by training and shared a lot of the same turf as the mythologist Joseph Campbell (both have a strong interest in Joyce and wrote heavily about myth's survival under the cover of what was passing for modernity), but honestly Davenport is the more interesting and varied writer, and funnier. This is a translation from an archaic Chinese text, explaining that poetry is a voice out of nature which must be rendered humanly in­ telligible, so that people can know how to live. 3Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1 9 7 1 ) , p. 1 04. The Geography of the Imagination turned out to be my stimulating introduction to Guy Davenport, the multifaceted American man of letters. The forty essays here amply convey the range & depth of this fascinating mind. Being fair, I likely rounded up as I think this would've been pristine were it 31 or 32 essays rather than 40. Many reviewers have noted that this is a master class of sorts; well, it is of a certain reading/poetic ideology. Yeah, I used that word. While Davenport confesses to subsisting often on fried bologna, canned soup and candy bars, his reclusive career is one to be celebrated. There may be cost to such a choice. Davenport is a follower of Ezra Pound. This extends to the authors elected to his poetic canon in the ABC of Reading and Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. This is sort of accepted without question. No need for everyone to learn Provencal but maybe someone should consider the merits of Auden or Gruppe 47?But, no doubt, sitting elsewhere, in well-used glory, well-thumbed, annotated with industrious pencilled scribbles, every essay pawed and pored over and fondly loved. As a critic, Davenport shines as an intrepid appreciator, an ideal teacher. By preference, he likes to walk the reader through a painting or a poem, teasing out the meaning of odd details, making connections with history and other works of art. His must-have essay collections, The Geography of the Imagination and Every Force Evolves a Form, display his range: With a rainwater clarity, he can write about the naturalist Louis Agassiz or ancient poetry and thought... He can account for the importance of prehistoric cave art to early modernism or outline the achievements of Joyce and Pound. He can make you yearn to read or look again at neglected masters like the poets Charles Olsen and Louis Zukofsky and the painters Balthus and Charles Burchfield. He can send you out eagerly searching for C. M. Doughty's six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf. In all this, his method is nothing other than the deep attentiveness engendered by love: that and a firm faith in simply knowing things. He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, 'a perfect balance of spirit and information." Yet it was the seeding of all sorts of things, of scholarship, of a stoic sense of pleasure (I think we were all bored and ill at ease when we went on official vacations to the mountains or the shore, whereas out arrowhead-looking we were content and easy), and most of all of foraging, that prehistoric urge still not bred out of man. There was also the sense of going out together but with each of us acting alone. You never look for Indian arrows in pairs. You fan out. But you shout discoveries and comments (“No Indian was ever around here!”) across fields. It was, come to think of it, a humanistic kind of hunt. My father never hunted animals, and I don’t think he ever killed anything in his life. All his brothers were keen huntsmen; I don’t know why he wasn’t. And, conversely, none of my uncles would have been caught dead doing anything so silly as looking for hours and hours for an incised rim of pottery or a Cherokee pipe. Charles Ives: Davenport calls him the "greatest (American) composer" ever & writes, "he considered Browning to be the great modern poet, and wrote a handsome, majestic overture in his honor- in twelve-tone rows, a dozen years before Schoenberg invented them."! And there's more: In a geography lesson or sequence of learning we can never present a place in all its glorious complexity. Any set of resources and images will always be grounded in time and the geographical imagination of the originator. Activities such as this help pupils become familiar with their own and others’ geographical imaginations. Multiple Identities

That Faire Field of Enna: an essay on the mythical matrix across Eudora Welty's fiction. Gass & Davenport have both endorsed her highly: "If one were asked what absolute distinction makes Miss Welty's fiction different, the answer would not be her alert, perfectly idiomatic, honest prose, nor her immense understanding of character, nor her transmutation of fact into universal symbol, but her unique study of inarticulateness." In his Paris Review interview, Davenport said: "She is the only writer we have who writes like Joyce."Any geography textbook or resource can only ever present a partial view of a place. Whenever we use place-based resources with our pupils there is the opportunity to develop their ability to ask critical questions, such as ‘What is missing?’ and ‘What else could be included?’. Ostensibly this is the only essay here that is attributed to Joyce, but Joyce turns up in practically every second essay in this book! Davenport plugs Joyce's books at every opportunity; not surprising really considering that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, his was the first thesis ever done there on Joyce! A common trait: as critics, both keep their selves out of the picture— the subject is their focus. Other than sharing a few anecdotes, Davenport completely erases himself from the scene: "Talking about oneself, said Menander, is a feast that starves the guest, and I hope in this essay to keep to the subject I was invited to consider." Despite his formidable erudition, Davenport comes across as affable & modest: "My writing is primitive and contrived, and I have never written about myself in any conscious way."(!)

The Man Without Contemporaries: a tribute to the memory of poet Osip Mandelstam & a discussion of his wife Nadezhda Madelstam's two memoirs, & Prof. Brown's critical studies on him. Finding : A very personal essay on Davenport's childhood excursions with his family down in the south- pretty much like Kohler's sunday outings. The childhood foraging of "Indian arrowheads" leading to the literary foraging of adult years. Search Google Images for ‘world maps’ and you will be presented with a wide-ranging selection of maps that represent the world. Many of these images have been manipulated for a purpose. Save a collection of these and use them in a PowerPoint Presentation with your pupils. This helps to develop their critical literacy and supports them in questioning information on the internet. Pupils will then develop a confidence in treating maps as representations rather than accepting them as unquestionable truths.

No one writes like Guy Davenport. He’s a genius, sure, but also a delightful, generous example of how exhilarating the life of the mind can be. These inventive and harmonious essays are a dazzling reminder that great writing is also great fun.”

Louis Agassiz : Apparently, the Comparative Method is his heritage which Pound then applied to literature. A brilliant essay, one of the longest & choc-a-bloc with quotable quotes. All those who pit scientists and humanists against one another/as poles apart, should read this essay: "One of the most provocative books on the biology of sex is by a poet, Remy de Gourmont; one of the finest on art, by a scientist, Leo Frobenius." However, this essay is mute on the racism controversy linked to AgassizIn these forty essays, spanning the length of a distinguished career, one of America’s major literary critics elucidates an astonishing range of literary history with both wit and wisdom.” Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2014-10-16 14:07:43.135402 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA1153312 City New York Donor