Guy Davenport

New & Selected Writing

The Death of Picasso

In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.

Forty Essays

The Geography of the Imagination

Twenty Essays

Every Force Evolves a Form

7 Greeks

Three Lyric Poets of the Seventh Century B.C.

Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

"The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination. The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes."—Guy Davenport Modernism spawned the greatest explosion of art, architecture, literature, painting, music, and dance of any era since the Renaissance. In its long unfolding, from Yeats, Pound and Eliot to Picasso and Matisse, from Diaghilev and Balanchine to Cunningham and Stravinsky and Cage, the work of Modernism has provided the cultural vocabulary of our time. One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called "assemblages"—lush experiments that often defy classification. Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport's fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Eight years after his death, The Guy Davenport Reader offers the first true introduction to the far–ranging work of this neglected genius.

The Guy Davenport Reader

These essays cover a range of topics, including art and architecture, religion, and literature in a collage of ideas, commentary, and criticism from snake handling to Wallace Stevens.

And Other Papers on Literature and Art

The Hunter Gracchus

A collection of short stories based on historical figures whose accomplishments were too early, too late, or against the grain of their time

Ten Stories

Da Vinci's Bicycle

Hugh Kenner

"Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) and Guy Davenport (1927-2005) first met in September 1953 when each gave a paper on Ezra Pound at Columbia University. They met again in the fall of 1957, and their correspondence begins with Kenner's letter of March 7, 1958. In the next forty-four years, they exchanged over one thousand letters. Their correspondence about shared enthusiasm is a quarry for those interested in unique perspectives on Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Stan Brakhage, Jonathan Williams, and the American modernists, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Louis Zukofsky. The correspondence ends with Kenner's letter of August 9, 2002 lamenting how they had drifted apart. With his mentor, Marshall McLuhan, Kenner visited Pound at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, in June 1948. Later he visited Pound in Venice and Rapallo. Davenport also was a visitor to St. Elizabeths, and, like Kenner, visited Pound in Italy. These letters record their fascination with Pound's intellectual journey and explore how he translated the "brutality of fact" into The Cantos. The extensive notes and cross-referencing of archival sources in Questioning Minds are a major contribution to the study of literary modernism. The letters contained within explore how new works were conceived and developed by both writers. They record faithfully, and with candor, the urgency that each brought to his intellectual and creative pursuits. Here is singular opportunity to follow the development of their unique fictions and essays" --

The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner

Questioning Minds

19 ensayos sobre arte y literatura

El museo en sí

Guy Davenport demonstrates his unparalleled critical vision as he interprets art, literature, and culture In this collection of 20 essays, Guy Davenport applies his insightful gaze and critical wisdom to topics including modern art and the effects of the automobile on contemporary society. His work ranges from “What Are Those Monkeys Doing?” in which he links the paintings of Rousseau to the writings of Rimbaud and Flaubert, to “Imaginary Americas,” a survey of the different roles America has filled in the imagination of Europeans. Davenport, 1 of the foremost American critics and intellectuals of the 20th century, brings his piercing intellect, encyclopedic references, and careful eye for detail to each piece in Every Force Evolves a Form. Whether writing on the philosophy behind modernism or a study of table manners, the paintings of Henri Rousseau or the design of Shaker handicrafts, Davenport always devotes his full attention and multi-angled analysis to the subject at hand. To read this thought-provoking collection is to see the inner-workings of Davenport’s brilliant mind, with its varied fascinations and unparalleled insights.

Elizabeth Hutton Turner

Elizabeth Garrity Ellis

During the 1920s, when cultural exchange across the Atlantic suddenly became heady and reciprocal, Americans traveling to Paris found their americanisme embraced. The French avant-garde, fueled by tempos and freedoms, loved jazz and the visual elegance of Machine Age aesthetics. The American fascination with technology, which electrified their work, gave new charge to European art. Paris welcomed Gerald Murphy, whose billboard-sized cubist icon dominated the 1924 Salon des Independants and launched a brief but briliant career; Stuart Davis, who explored the continuity between cubist painting, lithography, and jazz at the atelier Desjobert; Man Ray, who abandoned oils to begin "painting with light" in his movies and rayographs; and Alexander Calder whose wire circuses and portraits inspired critics to acknowledge art's inherent playfulness. Americans in Paris documents the work and influence of these four notables of the avant-garde, who startle and delight us even today.

(1921-1931) : Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, Alexander Calder

Americans in Paris

Ten stories, many on homosexual themes, some with intellectual overtones. The subjects range from a sex-thirsty boy scout troop leader, to a writer's musings on God while in a spa for nudists.

The Cardiff Team

"Correspondence between Thomas Merton and Ralph Eugene Meatyard": p. 65-75.

Photographs of Thomas Merton

Father Louie

International Center of Photography

The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard defy convention: they have been called visionary, surrealistic, and meditative. Whatever the label, these evocative images of friends and family and the natural world around his home illustrate a delicate psychology of human interaction. Meatyard was trained as an optician, a profession that he maintained all his life in Lexington, Kentucky; he bought a camera in 1950 for the sole purpose of photographing his first-born son. But shortly thereafter, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and developed a friendship with his photography teacher Van Deren Coke, as well as a circle of local writers and photographers, including Guy Davenport, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams, and Minor White. Family and friends freely participated in Meatyard's staged and mysterious images, which often involve masks and abandoned spaces, and obliquely reference social, political, and cultural issues. A key subject in Meatyard's work is the natural environment, which is featured in his Light on Water series, in which long exposures seem to create calligraphic texts, and his No-Focus series, in which he deliberately photographed stems and twigs out of focus. In one of his last series titled Motion-Sound, the pictures were made by moving the camera gently, creating multiple exposures of the woodland scenes that suggest abstract sound patterns. The book accompanies an exhibition organized by ICP Assistant Curator Cynthia Young with acclaimed writer and Meatyard friend, Guy Davenport, who also wrote the text. Also included are the exhibition history, chronology, and bibliography.

Charles Ephraim Burchfield

Reflects on Burchfield's expressive and unusually large-scale and densely painted watercolors of mystical and enlivened landscapes

Charles Burchfield's Seasons

Guy Davenport links the essential ideas of our cultural landscape in stories that nod to the philosophers, artists, and writers who came before him Reality, fiction, history, and art all converge in this collection as Guy Davenport explores complex ideas within narratives that are full of emotional depth. Fearless and inventive in style, these stories take many forms, such as the imagined World War I journals of sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in “The Bowmen of Shu” and the parallel tales of poets Matsuo Basho and Ezra Pound hiking the same mountain trail centuries apart in “Fifty-Seven Views of Fujiyama.” In the title story, which also features illustrations by the author, a group of philosophers tries to establish a utopia in Amsterdam, harkening back to a prelapsarian world of uncomplicated sexuality and nature untarnished by human influence. The idea that the past perpetually influences the present is at the heart of Apples and Pears as Davenport relocates his references from all eras to contemporary times—and as he uses measured, poetic language to uncover the cyclical nature of culture.

And Other Stories

Apples and Pears

A Table of Green Fields

Guy Davenport’s cerebral and innovative stories intricately assemble centuries’ worth of images and ideas Guy Davenport’s stories seamlessly illuminate his vast knowledge of theology, philosophy, botany, and art, in his singular style of finding harmony in the juxtaposition of different themes. Whether critiquing the politics of socialist realist art in “We Often Think of Lenin at the Clothespin Factory,” revisiting biblical tales in “Jonah,” or depicting an ancient Greek philosopher in “The Meadow,” Davenport demonstrates his talent for blending high-minded ideas with literary wit. Davenport’s writing is at its most confident when the author weaves between time periods and ideas, such as when he revisits Descartes through the eyes of an ancient Greek skeptic in “Pyrrhon of Elis,” wherein a doubting philosopher declares, “I may not be, I think”; or in “The Bicycle Rider,” in which a doctoral student studying imagery of demons in the Gospels is visited by angelic spirits and attempts to save the life of a nihilistic prostitute. In these stories and the others collected in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, Davenport’s signature approach to culture and humanity is on bold display.

Guy Davenport

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