But if he could be imperiously intellectual, he also went in for experimental fiction and wistful remembrances of childhood excursions, for dreamlike drawings and clever puns. For respite, you can turn to the last quarter of this book having some light, breezy essays: Trees, Table Manners, Jack Yeats the Elder, an endearing portrait of John Butler Yeats, "one of the most gifted portraitists in the history of art; the father of Jack Yeats, Ireland's greatest painter, and of William Butler Yeats, Ireland's greatest poet", Hobbitry about how Tolkien found those fanciful names, etc.

He is best known for his modernist-style short stories, but his range of works is wide, spanning poetry, translation, and criticism. Many of them are about adolescent men in utopian situations — on remote islands, on camping trips — in which they can openly love each other. 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.Davenport’s essay on Eudora Welty, I mean his fantasia on a theme of Eudora Welty, deserves a second look—or a third, or a fourth. Rumor had it that he was attracted to both men and women, but he never made any public declarations about his sexuality. One of Davenport’s most memorable pronouncements was that modernism represents “a renaissance of the archaic,” and therein lies its saving power. He's especially enamored of homegrown and largely self-educated American oddballs (the above three standing out as remarkable examples, along with Pound, Whitman, Melville, etc.

Such brute power can only be met with an equal and opposite moral strength, like that of the Jehovah's Witnesses who prayed for the souls of the machinegunners before whom they fell at Buchenwald, the singing Christians Nero nailed to crosses in the Circus, or Mandelstam's colleague the poet Gumilyov who crumbled under the volleys of a Soviet firing squad, clutching a Bible and a Homer to his heart. William Blake preceded him here, on the irreality of clock time, sensing the dislocations caused by time (a God remote in time easily became remote in space, an absentee landlord), and proceeding, in his enthusiastic way, to dine with Isaiah—one way of a suggesting that Isaiah’s mind is not a phenomenon fixed between 742 and 687 B.

Who would suspect the influence of Delacroix on Van Gogh; of Dickens on Kafka, of Harriet Beecher Stowe on Tolstoy? M. Doughty's six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf. Other highlights are sections on Eudora Welty, James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam (who was previously unknown to me), and anecdotal essays concerning Joyce Kilmer, Wittgenstein, Charles Ives, and Shelley's Ozymandias.

His subject matter tends to consist of modernist poets, painters and authors, the ancient greeks (Orpheus continues to follow me), the philosophy of language, and the odd lighthearted personal essay. There is no doubt that his restlessly polymathic stories, essays and stories-cum-essays are an acquired taste (albeit one that everyone should strive to acquire). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Their hair was curled with irons heated in an open fire, then oiled, then shoved into a bonnet it would tire a horse to wear.

When you see Degas’ dancers or his racehorses, see also his colleague in nineteenth century motion study, Muybridge, the London-born San Francisco bookseller who took up photography after a serious brain injury—he was thrown from a stagecoach whose operator had taken to using teams of half-wild mustangs in a bid to increase speed.Here was a man who lamented that Latin was no longer part of the standard curriculum, and subsisted on Snickers and deli meats. He can account for the importance of prehistoric cave art to early modernism or outline the achievements of Joyce and Pound. By 1916 this springtime was blighted by the World War, the tragic effects of which cannot be overstated. Scholars have been puzzling over the "future of the book" since Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim "the medium is the message" in the early 1950s.