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

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Now, the Davenport with its 40 essays has lain there neglected for some years, browning with age like a slow cooking piece of toast.

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. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Rumor had it that he was attracted to both men and women, but he never made any public declarations about his sexuality. 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.Davenport breaks down various lines from multiple translations of Homer's epic to show how the translator will always recreate his own version of the original.

Not only has he seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also has the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to make the connections, to see how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. Unless he designates that a poem is a paraphrase of Latin, we miss it, Latin having dropped from classrooms. 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. Muybridge’s photographs, the monumental Zoopraxia, kept Degas and Messonier up all night looking at it.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. 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. Davenport was too delighted in ‘rhymes, or affinities,’ as he put it, to tackle one subject at a time. M. Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf.