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

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Author, artist, literary critic and translator Guy Davenport was born on November 23, 1927 in Anderson, South Carolina. On paper, he was something else again; for three decades, he was an unassuming English professor at the University of Kentucky. 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. 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. He was also surprisingly radical: One of his heroes was the 19th-century utopian socialist Charles Fourier.

But, no doubt, sitting elsewhere, in well-used glory, well-thumbed, annotated with industrious pencilled scribbles, every essay pawed and pored over and fondly loved. Instead of sticking to one line of argument, they meander off into mazes and pause to ponder cul-de-sacs.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 . You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. M. Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain , and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf. We brought many things across the Atlantic, and the Pacific; many things we left behind: a critical choice to live with forever.

Davenport plugs Joyce's books at every opportunity; not surprising really considering that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, his was the first thesis ever done there on Joyce!

Guy Davenport provides links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present—and pretty much everything in between.

How strange [Pound’s] condemnation of usury sounded to a world that had forgotten the rage of Ruskin against the shrinking of all values into the shilling, the passionate voices of Fourier, Thoreau, and Marx that men were becoming the slaves of factories and machines.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. M. Doughty's six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf. So it was strange to read Davenport calmly, humbly, almost professorially explicating the ideogrammatic densities and “architectonic” collages of Pound and Olson, Marianne Moore and Paul Metcalf, without dropping even a hint that he is a part of their lineage, playing in the same league. The title struck me as a paradox though: geography deals with boundaries whereas imagination is famously boundless.