He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University in 1948 and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. 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. The title struck me as a paradox though: geography deals with boundaries whereas imagination is famously boundless. 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.

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.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. 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. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Robert Frost, teaching a class at America’s most prestigious and snootiest university, is surrounded by sycophantic “Harvardlings. Forty essays on history, art, and literature from one of the most incisive, and most exhilarating, critical minds of the twentieth century.

And for all his suspicion of modernity, with its spewing cars and its squawking televisions, he also believed that it had furnished us with the resources to rescue ourselves. Geography of the Imagination is part of Godine’s Nonpareil series: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics. But if he could be imperiously intellectual, he also went in for experimental fiction and wistful remembrances of childhood excursions, for dreamlike drawings and clever puns. It wasn’t until I reached the very last essay that I stopped wondering why he seemed to be holding back. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.A pure display of unmatched intellect which never ceases to unveil art and ideas previously unknown. Tchelitchew: an artist whose painting Cache-Cache turned up earlier on with reference to Finnegans Wake, finds a full chapter here: "Cache-Cache inspired parts of Eliot's Burnt Norton; William Carlos Williams's Paterson owes much to "Phenomena"; and some of the most mysteriously beautiful passages in Cocteau's Leone derive from Tchelitchew's doubled images. An exquisite, lovingly crafted meditation on plants, trees, and our place in the natural world, in the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek . Muybridge’s photographs, the monumental Zoopraxia, kept Degas and Messonier up all night looking at it. A veritable gateway drug to the likes of Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Paul Metcalf, and so, so many more.