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

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Davenport's apprenticeship of Pound served him well: his essays are prose ideograms- a succession of images in rapid cuts. Henry Award, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Guy Davenport, on the other hand, zips back and forth between the ages, then laterally across genres and mediums, teasing out parallels and themes between such strange bedfellows as, for example, Poe, Grant Wood, and the myth of Persephone, sure-handedly leading the reader through a byzantine maze of arcana and out into fuller perspectives. These are poets (Pound, Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson, among others) and their poems that the author expects us to be quite familiar with already, and honestly, many of these sections were over my head.

Literature is as pictorial as painting or sculpture,” he remarked in an interview, and his prose is both learned and luscious.To defend their then-and still-maligned master Davenport and Kenner had to vividly and concretely communicate his entire intellectual lineage, his often obscure sources and inspirations, his unsuspected sponsorship of Things We Know; to explicate Pound they required a prose that with its combinatory compression, genius for collage, and imagistic piquancy prepared readers for the summa of civilization we are assured is to be found in The Cantos. While Davenport confesses to subsisting often on fried bologna, canned soup and candy bars, his reclusive career is one to be celebrated.

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. 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. McLuhan famously argued that electronic media was creating a global village in which books would become obsolete. If reality can be pictured in words, words must be seen as a set of essences in parallel series to the world. 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.Unless he designates that a poem is a paraphrase of Latin, we miss it, Latin having dropped from classrooms. Pound cancelled in his own mind the disassociations that had been isolating fact from fact for centuries. The remainder of the twentieth century (most miserable of ages since the Barbarians poured into Rome) might profitably be spent putting together the human achievements which tyranny has kept behind walls. It is now clear that the poem rests most firmly in a deeper, stiller sense of humanity, the city and its continuity, symbolized by the goddess of field and citadel wearing the sanctuary of her people as a crown.