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

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Originally published in 1981 and reissued this winter, it is “not so much a book as a library,” as Davenport wrote of a friend’s monograph.

Being fair, I likely rounded up as I think this would've been pristine were it 31 or 32 essays rather than 40. The literary anecdote,” he wrote in “The Geography of the Imagination,” “is a genre all to itself,” and he certainly lent himself to it. There is no doubt that his restlessly polymathic stories, essays and stories-cum-essays are an acquired taste (albeit one that everyone should strive to acquire). For respite, you can turn to the last quarter of this book having some light, breezy essays: Trees, Table Manners, Jack Yeats the Elder, an endearing portrait of John Butler Yeats, "one of the most gifted portraitists in the history of art; the father of Jack Yeats, Ireland's greatest painter, and of William Butler Yeats, Ireland's greatest poet", Hobbitry about how Tolkien found those fanciful names, etc.Now, today, all - poems, essay and book itself - have undergone their obscure little resurrection from their entombment on the bottom shelf. He can make you yearn to read or look again at neglected masters like the poets Charles Olsen and Louis Zukofsky and the painters Balthus and Charles Burchfield. He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, ‘a perfect balance of spirit and information.

I don't know whether it would have been inspiring or overwhelming to have attended Guy Davenport's classes at the University of Kentucky. By preference, he likes to walk the reader through a painting or a poem, teasing out the meaning of odd details, making connections with history and other works of art.Pound cancelled in his own mind the disassociations that had been isolating fact from fact for centuries.