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

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As a scholar I have always kept literature and painting together as a compound subject, the one complementing the other: Milton and Dürer, Joyce and Tchelitchew, Apollinaire and Picasso, Kafka and Klee, Whistler and Henry James. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

Yet we constantly see and hear stories of betrayal, and many people have personally experienced a destructive breach of loyalty. An intimate, philosophic quest for eternity, amidst the disenchantments and disappointments of our time “Anyone who, in our age of disbelief, longs to believe in God will find Mr. Like their author, who translated the Greeks as he munched fried bologna, they refuse the constraints of classification, preferring to remain marvelously and lavishly multiple. Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed.

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.

Henry Award, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, 'a perfect balance of spirit and information. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.A movement is closed by them, a movement that began with Thoreau and Whitman, when America was opening out and possibilities were there to be stumbled over or embraced. It was wonderful learning about some new poets: Ronald Johnson features on my immediate horizon and I may now have sufficient impetus to purse Hugh Kenner's magnum opus. Both poems were printed there in their stages of creation - one a work of now recognised genius, the other to receive only a crumb of attention, as both were subsequently printed together in a newspaper and now perhaps again here, in this essay. Neither of them knew quite what to make of the defiantly literary changeling in their midst, and Davenport soon escaped to study art and classics at Duke, then English at Oxford and Harvard. But even as he grumbled and groused about American illiteracy, he was instinctively lowercase-d democratic, at least insofar as he dignified his readers by trusting them to follow the complex coils of his thinking.

The same man who enjoyed explicating the most arcane allusions in Pound’s impenetrabilia also observed, earnestly and beautifully, “Two lives we lead: in the world and in our minds. Whitman," Kafka told his friend Gustav Janouch, "belongs among the greatest formal innovators in the modern lyric. Each essay is a tour of the history of ideas and imagination, written with wit and startling erudition. One of Davenport’s most memorable pronouncements was that modernism represents “a renaissance of the archaic,” and therein lies its saving power. His awards include the Whiting Award, the National Magazine Award, the James Beard Writing Award, and the Windham-Campbell Prize.

I may see something in these works that resonates, but I don't know why, or else only dimly recognize the references. Accuracy in such matters being impossible, we can say nevertheless that the brilliant experimental period in twentieth-century art was stopped short in 1916. Cultus becomes our word culture, not in the portentous sense it now has, but in a much humbler sense. While Davenport confesses to subsisting often on fried bologna, canned soup and candy bars, his reclusive career is one to be celebrated.