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

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Geography of the Imagination is part of Godine’s Nonpareil series: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics.

Louis Agassiz : Apparently, the Comparative Method is his heritage which Pound then applied to literature. Davenport hailed it as “not so much a book as a library, or better, a new kind of book in which biography, history and analysis of literature are so harmoniously articulated that every page has a narrative sense”—and the same can be said of The Geography of the Imagination. More than its erudition, which seems inexhaustible and impossible; more than its quality of attention, animated in prose exact and alive and authoritative; more even than its elected awes, what distinguishes Guy Davenport’s criticism is its steadfastness in—and to—tradition. Except for individual talents, already in development before 1916, moving on to full maturity, the century was over in its sixteenth year. Here was a man who lamented that Latin was no longer part of the standard curriculum, and subsisted on Snickers and deli meats.Reading these essays is like getting a short master class in each topic, while being in the presence of an extraordinary prose style. he's at his best talking about ancient greece or modernist poetry; when he can combine the two (like when he's talking about pound) he's absolutely incredible. Davenport was too delighted in “rhymes, or affinities,” as he put it, to tackle one subject at a time.

In a wonderful essay on Davenport, the critic Wyatt Mason proposes that his short stories are answers to the question, “What if we were free? Marcel Siegler explores the dialectical relationship between human needs and desires, the demands and requirements of the built world, and the forms of organization that hold both humans and the built world together. 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. still gets four stars because the essays on pound, johnson, zukofsky, et al, the title piece, and some of the opening pieces are the best essays i've ever read. What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things-earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem not ever to have been looked at before.In 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. Neither of them knew quite what to make of the defiantly literary changeling in their midst, and Davenport soon escaped to study art and classics at Duke, then English at Oxford and Harvard. Forty essays on history, art, and literature from one of the most incisive, and most exhilarating, critical minds of the twentieth century.

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. You stand in awe of the connections he can make between the archaic and the modern; he makes the remote familiar and the familiar fundamental. He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization, which are apparently entirely contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena.Whereas I thought I knew something about the humanities and their historical perspective, I was astonished at how limited my fractional knowledge really was, and how ably Mr.

They do not declare themselves partisans of any school or genre; they do not instruct us in how to read them. We brought many things across the Atlantic, and the Pacific; many things we left behind: a critical choice to live with forever. It would feel intimidating and/or wankish, except he comes off like he's probably a super nice guy, so you don't feel threatened at all-- rather, he invites the reader into the dialogue regarding Charles Ives or William Carlos Williams or Stan Brakhage or some facet of everyday life.Without modernity, after all, there would be no modernism, and without modernism, there would be no hope.