"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 serves as the reader's guide through history and literature, providing links between music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present—pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking.
Davenport seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything ever written and had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. In these 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.
- New eBook additions
- Available now
- Travel Guides - Always Available!
- Home Cooking
- Duke Classics
- Immerse Yourself in a Long Sweeping Saga
- Mindfulness and Meditation
- Take Up a New Hobby
- New kids additions
- New teen additions
- Most popular
- Try something different
- Asian & Pacific American Heritage
- See all
- New audiobook additions
- New teen additions
- New kids additions
- Most popular
- Available now
- Great Narrators
- Learn a New Language!
- Try something different
- Audiobooks for your Commute
- Audiobooks for the Whole Family
- Everyone's Favorite Kids' Books of 2023
- See all