Forty essays on history, art, and literature from one of the most incisive, and most exhilarating, critical minds of the twentieth century. Guy Davenport was perhaps the last great American polymath. He provided links between art and literature, 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 in print, he also had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. In this collection, Guy 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.

The Hudson Review has always had an international focus. Travel and reports from abroad have figured prominently in the journal, including essays on exotic and picturesque locales, as well as accounts from war-torn areas and the experiences of exiles. Many of these are pilgrimages; others are harrowing memoirs. What unites even the most devastating of these accounts are intellectual curiosity and a spirit of adventure. Places Lost and Found is a treasury of distinctive and compelling essays selected from six decades of the Hudson Review. From a description of the gardens of Kyoto and a portrait of Syria just before its civil war to reflections on Veblen and the Mall of America, these essays explore an array of places that are deeply layered with history and meaning. The stunning cover photo of the Semper Opera House in Dresden encapsulates many of the themes of the book: war and its aftermath, the importance of the built environment in any discussion of "place," the endurance of civilization and resilience, and of course the romance of travel.

In his 1989 book on Balthus-the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century-Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years. Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport's distinct reflections on Balthus's paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer. Arguing that Balthus's figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, "The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin's naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus's, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction." Davenport's critique helps us understand Balthus in our times-something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.

Davenports meditations on the still life dip into the full history of this art formfrom Neolithic cave paintings to the Dutch masters, from Czanne and Van Gogh to photography and the collage.. In a series of four meditations on still-life painting, Guy Davenport blends art history with literary criticism, taking a close look at the iconic and symbolic function of objects and the multiple ways they are represented in culture. Focusing on a genre that is supposedly static, these essays reveal the dynamic forces that motivate and shape the still life, explaining why and how painters have employed this genre to such vital effect. In a series of four meditations on still-life painting, Guy Davenport blends art history with literary criticism, taking a close look at the iconic and symbolic function of objects and the multiple ways they are represented in culture. As always in Davenports eclectic and provocative work, specific themes or images that appear simple on the surface--apple and pear, a bust of Sherlock Holmes--resonate across human history to yield a rich interplay of meaning and story. Whether ancient or modern--an image found within an Egyptian tomb or a painting by van Gogh, a verse from the Book of Amos or a passage from Joyce--the works that Davenport discusses are parsed and analyzed for the clues within silent objects (the fruit basket, the postage stamp, the clock) with brilliant erudition. Feats of maverick detective work, Davenports readings of art never fail to surprise and inform.Focusing on a genre that is ostensibly static, these meditations reveal the dynamic forces that motivate and shape the use of still life, explaining why and how painters have employed this form to such vital effect. As Davenport says here, Culture is like a magnetic field, a patterned energy shaping history. It is invisible, even unsuspected, until a receiver sensitive enough to pick up its messages can give it a voice. When Ezra Pound said that poets are the antennae of the race, he meant radio antennae, not insects only. Readers, whether they are newcomers or devoted fans of Davenports extraordinary work, will discover that Objects on a Table broadcasts the energy of cultural patterns in a way that will awaken them to the music within.

Jesus was a street preacher who taught through story and aphorism. Antedating the Gospels, these 105 sayings were recorded by his followers during and shortly after his lifetime. Through the immediacy of direct quotation, Davenport and Urrutia's bold translation shakes our preconceptions, reintroducing us to the living teacher whose powerful words ring anew.

Open the pages of The Hunter Gracchus and step into the remarkable mind of Guy Davenport, one of this countrys most provocative writers. Moving effortlessly from snake handling to Wallace Stevens, these essays take delight in an immense range of topics, including art and architecture, religion, and literature. Open the pages of The Hunter Gracchus and step into the remarkable mind of Guy Davenport, one of this countrys most brilliant and provocative writers. Hardly the typical essay collection, The Hunter Gracchus is better described as a collage of ideas, commentary, and criticism from an eclectic stylist whose sentences ring with clarity and originality.Moving effortlessly from snake handling to Wallace Stevens, these essays take delight in an immense range of topics, including art and architecture, religion and literature--all approached from Davenports deeply personal point of view. In one essay, Davenport recalls a lunch with Thomas Merton at the Ramada Inn, where Merton, already the worlds most famous Trappist monk, drank several martinis and held forth on the architecture of Buddhist temples. In another, Davenport finds in postwar modernism a catalogue of our lost innocence. In the stunning title essay, he maps out the world of a posthumously published story by Franz Kafka.Davenport has the singular and joyous ability to read into human artifacts--Picassos Guernica , a pattern of bricks, a Shaker design for easy-to-clean revolving windows. His kinetic prose unfolds surprising connections of influence, transporting readers from the world of the intellectual to the world of the extraordinary.The way I write about texts and works of art, Davenport says in his introductory note, has been shaped by forty years of explaining them to students in a classroom. I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

Contains The First Appearance Of Ezra Pound's Ars Vivendi, And Contributions By Austen Warren, Jean Helion, Guy Davenport, Olivier Bernier And Others.

Since the publication of Tatlin! in 1974, Guy Davenport has established himself as one of the most original and stimulating writers of fiction today. Twelve Stories draws the best work from Davenports early collections: Tatlin! , Apples and Pears , and The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers . Chosen by the author, these stories are nowhere else in print.Guy Davenports short stories are journeys through history and the imagination. Radically original and surprising, comic and sensuous, Davenports virtuoso talent charms us into a world both familiar and strange. Whether in the timelessness of deep woods or fleeing the bloody dreamscape of battle, Davenports characters embody lifes contradictions.

The Hudson Review has always had an international focus. Travel and reports from abroad have figured prominently in the journal, including essays on exotic and picturesque locales, as well as accounts from war-torn areas and the experiences of exiles. Many of these are pilgrimages; others are harrowing memoirs. What unites even the most devastating of these accounts are intellectual curiosity and a spirit of adventure. Places Lost and Found is a treasury of distinctive and compelling essays selected from six decades of the Hudson Review. From a description of the gardens of Kyoto and a portrait of Syria just before its civil war to reflections on Veblen and the Mall of America, these essays explore an array of places that are deeply layered with history and meaning. The stunning cover photo of the Semper Opera House in Dresden encapsulates many of the themes of the book: war and its aftermath, the importance of the built environment in any discussion of "place," the endurance of civilization and resilience, and of course the romance of travel.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

This volume features selections from the New Directions founder's correspondence with Guy Davenport, the polymath artist and author of "The Geography of the Imagination." More than simply detailing an author/publisher relationship, these letters depict two fine minds educating and supporting each other in the service of literature.

Selected writings of the remarkable teacher, lecturer, and scientist, Louis Agassiz, whose enthusiasm for natural history is communicated with vitality and precision. The editor's introduction and notes at the beginning of each chapter provide a cogent analysis of the contributions of the scientist-writer.

Guy Davenport's story collection A Table of Green Fields (New Directions, 1993) was praised for its amazing artistry and "stratospheric" literary intelligence (Kirkus Reviews). As The Washington Post noted, "It draws one in with its austere, beautifully formal sentences, its rich pattern of memory." In Davenport's follow-up collection, The Cardiff Team, the stories continue in this vein, their texts a wondrous collage of persons, events, and ideas from cultural history. The central theme is that of tribeless people joining, or trying to join, a team, a tribe, or a society. In "The Messengers," Franz Kafka visits the Jungborn Health Spa in the Harz mountains and tries to feel comfortable in his own skin. In "Boys Smell Like Oranges," a soccer team of boys from Henry de Montherlant's Les Olympiques is its own contained tribe. The Cardiff Team perfectly displays Guy Davenport's illustrious prose and his audacity; confirming The New Yorker's assertion that his is "among the very few, truly original voices now audible in American letters."

A Table of Green Fields includes ten stories, variously about the painter Henry Scott Tuke, the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, Kafka, Thoreau, along with some imaginary Frenchmen and Scandinavians, among others. Calculating the infinite in the finite, tracing geometries of desire, placing the obdurate world in an uncustomary light, each of these stories opens out its own world. Without giving up the plot or character of the traditional short story, Guy Davenport's inventions are complex events in which ideas and cultural history are a kind of music to which the characters dance. Despite the fractal, syncopated collage of his narrative style, Davenport's prose is objective, terse, and transparent. A constant theme in this book is the transmission of the past as an imaginative act; hence the title, Falstaff's dying vision of "a table of green fields," probably a mishearing of his recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, corrected by editors to "he babbled of green fields," a symbol of all fiction, an art that must be exact about the uncertain.