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

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All sexual predilections are arranged for and honored for their diversity,” he wrote with a twinge of longing about the society Fourier envisioned. That's the thrust - modern literature and poetry and art and even music and architecture peeled back layer by layer to uncover their links to antiquity - and how those allusions to the past skip over the present's community conscious like a flat rock across a shallow creek. Now, the Davenport with its 40 essays has lain there neglected for some years, browning with age like a slow cooking piece of toast.

This is the sort of book that celebrates humanism and leaves the reader breathless, as if having attended a reception where everybody who was anybody from Homer and all his characters to Wittgenstein and beyond has been present and asked you some probing question. 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. Nothing characterizes the twentieth century more than its inability to pay attention to anything for more than a week. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University in 1948 and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar.

We new-world settlers, then, brought the imagination of other countries to transplant it in a different geography. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. To have closed the gap between mythology and botany is but one movement of the process; one way to read The Cantos is to go through noting the restorations of relationships now thought to be discrete—the ideogrammatic method was invented for just this purpose.

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. 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.

I came to the book for Davenport's essay on his neighbor, the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (both men worked and flourished in the same "rotting Kentucky town", Lexington), but all 40 of these essays (written in the 1970's) are well worth devouring. 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. He voted Democratic until he veered leftward and cast a ballot for Ralph Nader, but he was a regular contributor to the conservative National Review, mostly because the editors there let him say what he wanted about the books he loved.

I go back to this book when I am feeling too tired to read anything new, or feeling dull or complacent. 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.Instead of sticking to one line of argument, they meander off into mazes and pause to ponder cul-de-sacs. 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 earned a Bachelor of Literature from Merton College, Oxford University in 1950 and a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University in 1961. Davenport’s criticism feels so self-contained that one swallows it with the hungry thoughtlessness of an eternal student. I always seemed to find myself book browsing on rainy afternoons when I would wander up the book shelved hallway into my bedroom where, lying aslant my bed, I'd dip into the bottom shelf of my large bookcase there, in the semi-darkness, and lazily cruise in and out of various volumes.

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. I don't know whether it would have been inspiring or overwhelming to have attended Guy Davenport's classes at the University of Kentucky. My only prior exposure was “Some Verses of Virgil,” the novella that closes his collection Eclogues.He serves as our guide through the jungles of history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. In one essay, he did his best to scandalize the magazine’s readership by praising the beauty of androgyny.