A Mapping of the Mind

...The elusive density of Pound's Cantos, their linguistic subtlety and their cognizance of world'history, for example, interest him more than Lowell's Puritan guilt, religious conventions and diction, and Yankee slang of maritime origin...

...He reminds us that "cultus," the dwelling of a god, gives us our word "culture...

...His observation that "a geography of the imagination would extend from the shores of the Mediterranean all the way to Iowa" articulates the principle informing Davenport's most important discussions...

...What Davenport means by a "geography of the imagination" is a map of inherited terrain with boundaries that every serious artist must expand...

...Reviewed by William C. Watterson Assistant Professor of English, Bowdoin College Oscar Wilde once complained about the provincialism of certain Bostonians in terms that still apply to the educated of America: "They take their learning too sadly...

...When Eudora Welty in " Delta Wedding" or Edgar Allan Poe in "The Fall of the House of Usher" self-consciously rewrite the Orpheus myth, for instance, they are recasting the essential truths of humanity in a context that is familiar to them and not simply polishing old statues...

...Natural sciences at Harvard in the 19th century and its influence on the modern poetic idiom (Davenport has written an engaging book on Louis Agassiz), the history of table manners, translating Homer, hobbitry, images of the American Indian, Picasso's debt to the cave painting of the Dordogne, James Joyce's use of Mithraic symbolism, Poe's taste in interior decoration, Mayan birdlore and Charles Olson's "The Kingfishers," the originality of Ralph Meatyard as man and artist, and Daedalian impulses in modern poetry and painting????All of these are discussed...

...Whether "A " is the most imaginative "geography" nevertheless remains to be seen...

...Whether book review, biographical sketch, personal reminiscence, or lively commentary on the work of a writer or painter, each effort aims to invigorate, not embalm...

...With his mentor, Hugh Kenner, to whom this book is dedicated, he fights against the exclusivism of intellectual categories sanctioned by the university...

...it was more like Uncle Remus up at the big house, Tomming it to a fare-thee-well...

...For this classicist and translator of Archilochus, Heraclitus and Sappho, a full awareness of the cultural "moment" can come only from a historical erudition coupled with a lively dance of the mind...

...It is especially refreshing, therefore, when a polymath such as Guy Davenport plays freely over a broad range of topics, as he does in this collection of 40 pieces published in various journals over the past 10 years...

...Few of what he calls the "professariat" would dispute his observations on Walt Whitman, Poe, Herman Melville, or Wallace Stevens, but his paeans to Olson and Zukofsky may strike some as hyperbolic...

...And culture at its richest is made up of created things that must be approached with sensitivity, curiosity and a tough-mindedness, for they contain a mystery transcending the reductionistic impulse of much formal academic inquiry...

...So are more standard topics, including Ezra Pound's use of mythology and landscape, Joyce's debt to Homer and William Carlos Williams' city poetry...

...At times Davenport seems to be a cultural anthropologist who will use any evidence available to illuminate a civilization or to shed light onaworkof art...

...hence he must scrutinize the history of culture not with Spengler's perspective of linear exhaustion, nor with Vico's belief in cycles, but with an eye to the continuous dialectic between the primal and civilizing instincts of man...

...Whatever the final verdict, Davenport calls strenuously for his fellow critics to attend to a poet whose architecture of forms he claims will one day be recognized as equal to Joyce's...

...Oscar Wilde would see Guy Davenport's free play of mind as a triumph...

...He does not much care for "self-expression" as a substitute for profundity in poetry, and he dismisses Robert Lowell as a grand bourgeois, a stylish wordsmith who coats his confessions with a thin glaze of rhetoric...

...Pablo Picasso and Pavel Tchelitchew are thus seen, somewhat romantically perhaps, as great artists whose personal energies and supreme historical consciousness have allowed them to achieve a radical innocence...

...Davenport occasionally steps on some of the clay feet that plod down the polished floors of academe, but he sees the critic's task as reaching for new horizons in evaluating the current state of our culture...

...culture with them is an achievement rather than an atmosphere...

...Zukofsky is "the most Apollonian of our poets, but his Apollo cavorts with Pan and Priapus...

...He dwells more on American than European "geography" (though for him the two are inseparable, because he views cultural history as a continuum...

...Davenport's witty style is quite in keeping with his view of civilization as nurturing jeux d'esprit...

...Davenport's central image amounts to the pastoral wilderness within, where the archetypes are mediated in acts of creation and contemplation...

...The critic revels throughout in the ironic and the arcane, and is at his best decoding Joyce or Pound or Louis Zukofsky...

...The wide variety of fare Davenport of f ers will irritate the stodgy and delight the sophisticated...

...Moreover, since this cartography has a temporal as well as a spatial dimension, its terra incognita is virtually infinite...

...History actually confers "meaning," it does not merely refine our understanding of a work of art...

...Hall's 'Mortimer Snerd' is a bit harsh...

...one also comes upon the sonnet, the sestina and the masque, the last involving 70 minutes of Handel's music for the harpsichord accompanied by four voices reading various Zukofsky texts in counterpoint...

...Rich in wit and insight, these essays on history, literature and art eschew the systematic rigor of academic discourse in favor of a critical idiom that is bold and exploratory...

...Like Northrop Frye, Davenport traces metamorphoses by positing a core of archetypes that recur in different genres, narratives, symbols, ideograms and images...

...About Frost, who was faulted by Donald Hall for becoming a professional public figure in his later years, we are told: "He was a mysterious and secret man who put on his Norman Rockwell face for any public whatever...

...Favoring, as he does, the eclectic sensibility of high art (he notes, in an essay entitled "Cummings" that "one of the things utterly forgotten about poets is that they come in hierarchies and orders"), Davenport nonetheless waxes critical of those whom the academic world has lionized...

...Of the latter he says after briefly examining "A "and Bottom and Catullus, that Zukofsky must be considered "not so much a poet's poet and a poet's poet's poet, and may be the last great man of the greatest generation of the Men of 1914, the inventors of the art of the century...

...At the same time, there is a striving after the epigrammatic in Davenport's skillful use of generalizations, metaphors and puns...

...In his impassioned discourse, in his enlightened love of comparison, in his intellectual passion for art we glimpse the 18th century's firm sense of values...

...Quotations from classical Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and German are embedded in the author's own racy and sometimes colloquial prose...

...Iconography is that sublime and most painstaking of humanistic disciplines," he tells us in his essay on Tchelitchew, and there are plenty of labyrinths in modern art that require the Theseus-like ingenuity of a Davenport...

...What Davenport values is not so much a particular voice in a particular time as a disembodied voice synthesizing everything it knows about history and art...

...Certainly one finds the classics there, along with Judaism, Christianity, Maoism and Buckminster Fuller...

...Davenport's learning is immense, his ideas original and his delivery polished and easy...