It would feel intimidating and/or wankish, except he comes off like he's probably a super nice guy, so you don't feel threatened at all-- rather, he invites the reader into the dialogue regarding Charles Ives or William Carlos Williams or Stan Brakhage or some facet of everyday life. I was twenty years old and had just moved to NYC, where I found a job within a couple weeks at Endicott Booksellers. It doesn't matter, because there are plenty of other connections that ring true, and the point isn't so much whether the artists were aware of it as that, with the trained eye (or guided, as I was by the author), it's possible to recognize and appreciate the subtleties permeating their art. In this collection, 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.

Reading these essays is like getting a short master class in each topic, while being in the presence of an extraordinary prose style.He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University in 1948 and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar.

I don't know whether it would have been inspiring or overwhelming to have attended Guy Davenport's classes at the University of Kentucky.He earned a Bachelor of Literature from Merton College, Oxford University in 1950 and a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University in 1961. It is now clear that the poem rests most firmly in a deeper, stiller sense of humanity, the city and its continuity, symbolized by the goddess of field and citadel wearing the sanctuary of her people as a crown. As The Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote, "There is no way to prepare yourself for reading Guy Davenport. Davenport compares the various translations of Odyssey: Chapman, Logue, Bryant,Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Pope, Fenton, and Broome, Butcher and Lang, Samual Butler, Col. We can scarcely begin to realize his world in which the pencil stub and the three pieces of paper YOU have is all the pencil and all the paper you are ever going to have.