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

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All those who pit scientists and humanists against one another/as poles apart, should read this essay: "One of the most provocative books on the biology of sex is by a poet, Remy de Gourmont; one of the finest on art, by a scientist, Leo Frobenius. 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. Kenner must struggle with in this first full-scale study of Pound and his era is that Pound was the first to arrive in the modern renaissance, and his reputation will be the last to arrive in its proper place in the world's opinion. Pound cancelled in his own mind the disassociations that had been isolating fact from fact for centuries. His awards include the Whiting Award, the National Magazine Award, the James Beard Writing Award, and the Windham-Campbell Prize.

Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, American Psychological AssociationWinner of a PROSE Award, Association of American PublishersShortlist, Cognitive Development Society Book AwardA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year . He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, ‘a perfect balance of spirit and information. Geography of the Imagination is part of Godine’s Nonpareil series: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics. He was really a Christian and with a close affinity especially to us Jews-he was therefore an important measure of the status and worth of humanity. The great modernist archaic, our Montaigne by way of Emerson, whose thoughts elide easily such disparates as Ancient Greece and the Old Testament and Kafka's Prague or Joyce's nightworld, to show us there are no disparities, no true separation, that the human culture which creates the great works of Art is the flame which needs to be kindled, to be carried in a horn through the night as embers for generation unto generation, who makes in these essays a prose-place like eddies out of the River of Time, where the first thought and the last thought commingle and speak with each other and their voices attend to every force that has evolved a form, and every noble creative impulse is resolved into a concept, a graspable infinite, a gift for humanity.

How strange [Pound’s] condemnation of usury sounded to a world that had forgotten the rage of Ruskin against the shrinking of all values into the shilling, the passionate voices of Fourier, Thoreau, and Marx that men were becoming the slaves of factories and machines. 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. to cultural geographer Fernand Braudel's complaint, "We have museum catalogues but no artistic atlases," to the Persephone myth in an O.

Faustus is a rich composite, an allegory of the German spirit, but we still have to account for descriptions of imaginary music corresponding so eerily to the Fourth Symphony (Ives').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. Even Davenport concedes: "I am not able here to give any notion of the wideness of these last Maximus poems-the horizon they survey is vast-nor of their depth, which goes back into various histories (the Hittite, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, paleolithic) in new and bright ways (Olson's eyes were open to everything and very little got by him). Here was a man who lamented that Latin was no longer part of the standard curriculum, and subsisted on Snickers and deli meats. 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. Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed.

Like their author, who translated the Greeks as he munched fried bologna, they refuse the constraints of classification, preferring to remain marvelously and lavishly multiple. Davenport hailed it as “not so much a book as a library, or better, a new kind of book in which biography, history and analysis of literature are so harmoniously articulated that every page has a narrative sense”—and the same can be said of The Geography of the Imagination. It doesn't matter, because there are plenty of other connections that ring true, and the point isn't so much whether the artists were aware of it as that, with the trained eye (or guided, as I was by the author), it's possible to recognize and appreciate the subtleties permeating their art.I was twenty years old and had just moved to NYC, where I found a job within a couple weeks at Endicott Booksellers.

Whereas I thought I knew something about the humanities and their historical perspective, I was astonished at how limited my fractional knowledge really was, and how ably Mr. Muybridge’s photographs, the monumental Zoopraxia, kept Degas and Messonier up all night looking at it. We can scarcely begin to realize his world in which the pencil stub and the three pieces of paper YOU have is all the pencil and all the paper you are ever going to have. The same man who enjoyed explicating the most arcane allusions in Pound’s impenetrabilia also observed, earnestly and beautifully, ‘Two lives we lead: in the world and in our minds. 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.

To be sure, the critical prose instigated by Pound has its drawbacks—essentially peremptory, its salutary solicitousness of the unknown masterpiece, the obscured context, the neglected relation can become at times a hectoring of us ignorant barbarians—but on the whole I love it. I always seemed to find myself book browsing on rainy afternoons when I would wander up the book shelved hallway into my bedroom where, lying aslant my bed, I'd dip into the bottom shelf of my large bookcase there, in the semi-darkness, and lazily cruise in and out of various volumes.