“One of the most sinuous stylists and searching minds of the twentieth century.”—Washington Post


Forty essays on history, art, and literature to lift your mind and spirit. Guy Davenport provides links between music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present—and pretty much everything in between. Not only had Davenport seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything ever written, he also had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization.

Davenport serves as the reader’s guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. In these forty essays we find fresh thinking on Greek culture, Whitman, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Melville, Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, Eudora Welty, Louis Zukovsky, and many others. Each essay is a tour of the history of ideas and imagination, written with wit and startling erudition.



This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Introduction by: John Jeremiah Sullivan