The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78): 10 (Nonpareil Books, 10)

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I was twenty years old and had just moved to NYC, where I found a job within a couple weeks at Endicott Booksellers. Originally published in 1981 and reissued this winter, it is “not so much a book as a library,” as Davenport wrote of a friend’s monograph.

Davenport’s criticism feels so self-contained that one swallows it with the hungry thoughtlessness of an eternal student. Both poems were printed there in their stages of creation - one a work of now recognised genius, the other to receive only a crumb of attention, as both were subsequently printed together in a newspaper and now perhaps again here, in this essay. One thing I particularly like about a few of the essays is that many of the points Davenport makes in his discussions of painting and literature seem exclusive to him--at least to the extent that I have not seen these points made in other commentators' work, for what that's worth. He speculates about the meaning of modernity, but he also recounts his heroic attempts to extinguish a flaming Jean-Paul Sartre (the famed existentialist had carelessly jammed a lighted pipe in his pocket) and his fruitless efforts to learn Old English from a professor who talked to his toes (the mumbler’s name was J. Pound cancelled in his own mind the disassociations that had been isolating fact from fact for centuries.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The title struck me as a paradox though: geography deals with boundaries whereas imagination is famously boundless. I go back to this book when I am feeling too tired to read anything new, or feeling dull or complacent. The literary anecdote,” he wrote in “The Geography of the Imagination,” “is a genre all to itself,” and he certainly lent himself to it. It’s packed with those vivid, meaning-making connections apparent to and privately gathered by common readers, but often excluded from the dossiers handed down to us in school and in most journalistic book review columns.

Davenport was too delighted in “rhymes, or affinities,” as he put it, to tackle one subject at a time. Luckily, his books exist and one can pick, choose, and read at one's own leisure without being overwhelmed. To have closed the gap between mythology and botany is but one movement of the process; one way to read The Cantos is to go through noting the restorations of relationships now thought to be discrete—the ideogrammatic method was invented for just this purpose.The Latin word for the sacredness of a place is cultus, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is valid. Man's idea of God, though, is in trouble; his idea of the state is in trouble; and an awful restlessness begins to disturb the inert, paralyzed, darkened life of the people. I wish every English teacher read this book and shared the insights with their students -- hopefully with shades of enthusiasm and passion like Guy Davenport.