Guy Davenport
Encyclopedia
Guy Mattison Davenport was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.
, in the foothills of Appalachia
on November 23, 1927. His father was an agent for the Railway Express Agency
. Davenport said that he became a reader only at age ten, with a neighbor’s gift of one of the Tarzan
series. At age eleven, he began a neighborhood newspaper, drawing all the illustrations and writing all the stories. At age thirteen, he "broke [his] right leg (skating) and was laid up for a wearisome while"; it was then that he began "reading with real interest", beginning with a biography of Leonardo
. He left high school early and enrolled at Duke University
a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday. At Duke, he studied art(with Clare Leighton
), graduating with a degree in classics
and English literature.
Davenport was a Rhodes Scholar
at Merton College, Oxford
, from 1948 to 1950. He studied Old English under J. R. R. Tolkien
and wrote Oxford’s first thesis on James Joyce
. In 1950, upon his return to the United States, Davenport was drafted into the US Army for two years, spending them at Fort Bragg
in the 756th Field Artillery
, then in the XVIII Airborne Corps. After the army, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis
until 1955, when he began earning a PhD at Harvard
, studying under Harry Levin
and Archibald MacLeish
.
Davenport befriended Ezra Pound
during the poet’s incarceration in St. Elizabeths Hospital
, visiting him annually from 1952 until Pound's release in 1958, and later at his home in Rapallo
, Italy. Davenport described one such visit, in 1963, in the story "Ithaka". Davenport wrote his dissertation on Pound’s poetry, published as Cities on Hills in 1983.
After completing his Ph.D., he taught at Haverford College
from 1961 to 1963 but soon took a position at the University of Kentucky
, "the remotest offer with the most pay" (as he wrote to Jonathan Williams
). Davenport taught at Kentucky until he received a MacArthur Fellowship, which prompted his retirement at the end of 1990.
Davenport was married briefly in the early 1960s. He dedicated Eclogues, 1981, to "Bonnie Jean" (Cox), his companion from 1965 until his death. Other Davenport volumes dedicated to Cox include Objects on a Table, 1998, and The Death of Picasso, 2004. Cox became Trustee for the Guy Davenport Estate.
The range of Davenport's literary and artistic friendships was remarkable. In addition to Pound and Williams, Davenport knew Hugh Kenner
, Laurence Scott, Louis Zukofsky
, Samuel Beckett
, Christopher Middleton
, Thomas Merton
, Wendell Berry
, Buckminster Fuller
, Eudora Welty
, Samuel R. Delany
, Robert Kelly
, James Laughlin
, Allen Ginsberg
, Stan Brakhage
, Ronald Johnson
, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard
, his neighbor.
Two sentences he wrote about Meatyard apply to himself as well: "He was rare among American artists in that he was not obsessed with his own image in the world. He could therefore live in perfect privacy in a rotting Kentucky town."
In one of his essays, Davenport claimed to "live almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell's soup, and Snickers bars".
He died of lung cancer on January 4, 2005, in Lexington, Kentucky
.
," which is based on Kafka
's visit to an air show in September 1909. His books include Tatlin
!, Da Vinci
's Bicycle, Eclogue
s, Apples and Pears, The Jules Verne
Steam Balloon, The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devon
shire Fusilier
s, A Table of Green Fields, The Cardiff
Team, and Wo es war, soll ich werden. His fiction uses three general modes of exposition: the fictionalizing of historical events and figures; the foregrounding of formal narrative experiments, especially with the use of collage
; and the depicting of a Fourierist
utopia
, where small groups of men, women, and children have eliminated the separation between mind and body.
The first of more than four hundred Davenport essays, articles, introductions, and book reviews appeared while he was still an undergraduate; the last, just weeks before his death. Davenport was a regular reviewer for National Review
and The Hudson Review
, and, late in his life, at the invitation of John Jeremiah Sullivan
, he spent a year writing the "New Books" column for Harper's Magazine
. His essays range from literary to social topics, from brief book reviews to lectures such as the title piece in his first collection of essays, The Geography of the Imagination. His other collections of essays were Every Force Evolves a Form and The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art.
He also published two slim volumes on art: A Balthus
Notebook and Objects on a Table. Although he wrote on many topics, Davenport, who never had a driver's license, was especially passionate about the destruction of American cities by the automobile.
Davenport published a handful of poems. The longest are the book-length Flowers and Leaves, an intricate meditation on art and America, and "The Resurrection in Cookham
Churchyard" (borrowing the title from a painting by Stanley Spencer
). A selection of his poems and translations was published as Thasos
and Ohio
.
Davenport translated ancient Greek texts, particularly from the archaic
period. These were published in periodicals, then small volumes, and finally collected in 7 Greeks. He also translated the occasional other piece, including a few poems of Rilke
's, some ancient Egypt
ian texts [after Boris de Rachewiltz
]), and, with Benjamin Urrutia
, the sayings of Jesus, published as The Logia
of Yeshua
.
s, [continued] throughout school, the army, and his early years as a teacher." He drew or painted nearly every day of his life, and his notebooks contain drawings and pasted-in illustrations and photos cheek by jowl with his own observations and other writings and quotations from others.
From college forward, Davenport supplied cover art and decorations to literary periodicals. He also supplied illustrations for others' books, notably two by Hugh Kenner
: The Stoic Comedians (1962) and The Counterfeiters (1968).
As a visual artist (and childhood newspaper magnate) who also wrote, Davenport had a lifelong interest in printing and book design. His poems and fictions were often first published in limited editions by small press craftsmen.
In 1965 Davenport and Laurence Scott prepared and printed Pound's Canto CX in an edition of 118 copies, 80 of which they presented to Pound for his 80th birthday. The previous year they had produced Ezra's Bowmen of Shu
on the same press, a double broadside that published for the first time, with a brief introductory essay by Davenport, a drawing by sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
and a letter of Gaudier's from the trenches of World War I that cites Pound's poem (translated from one in the Shi Jing
) "The Song of the Bowmen of Shu".
Many of Davenport's earlier stories are combinations of pictures and text, especially Tatlin! and Apples and Pears (where some of the illustrations are of pages that resemble those of his own notebooks).
"It was my intention, when I began writing fiction several years ago, to construct texts that were both written and drawn.... I continued this method right through Apples and Pears... The designer [of A+P] understood [my] collages to be gratuitous illustrations having nothing to do with anything, reduced them all to burnt toast, framed them with nonsensical lines, and sabotaged my whole enterprise. I took this as final defeat, and haven't tried to combine drawing and writing in any later work of fiction."
Some of these pieces were included in Davenport's collections of essays.
Life
Guy Davenport was born in Anderson, South CarolinaAnderson, South Carolina
Anderson is a city in and the county seat of Anderson County, South Carolina, United States. The population was estimated at 26,242 in 2006, and the city was the center of an urbanized area of 70,530...
, in the foothills of Appalachia
Appalachia
Appalachia is a term used to describe a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S...
on November 23, 1927. His father was an agent for the Railway Express Agency
Railway Express Agency
The Railway Express Agency was a the national monopoly set up by the Untied States federal government in 1917. Rail express services provided small package and parcel transportation using the extant railroad infrastructure much as UPS functions today using the road system...
. Davenport said that he became a reader only at age ten, with a neighbor’s gift of one of the Tarzan
Tarzan
Tarzan is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungles by the Mangani "great apes"; he later experiences civilization only to largely reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer...
series. At age eleven, he began a neighborhood newspaper, drawing all the illustrations and writing all the stories. At age thirteen, he "broke [his] right leg (skating) and was laid up for a wearisome while"; it was then that he began "reading with real interest", beginning with a biography of Leonardo
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
. He left high school early and enrolled at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday. At Duke, he studied art(with Clare Leighton
Clare Leighton
Clare Veronica Hope Leighton was an English/American artist, writer and illustrator, best known for her wood engravings.Clare Leighton was born in London on 12 April 1898, the daughter of Robert Leighton and Marie Connor Leighton , both authors...
), graduating with a degree in classics
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
and English literature.
Davenport was a Rhodes Scholar
Rhodes Scholarship
The Rhodes Scholarship, named after Cecil Rhodes, is an international postgraduate award for study at the University of Oxford. It was the first large-scale programme of international scholarships, and is widely considered the "world's most prestigious scholarship" by many public sources such as...
at Merton College, Oxford
Merton College, Oxford
Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later to Edward I, first drew up statutes for an independent academic community and established endowments to...
, from 1948 to 1950. He studied Old English under J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
and wrote Oxford’s first thesis on James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
. In 1950, upon his return to the United States, Davenport was drafted into the US Army for two years, spending them at Fort Bragg
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
Fort Bragg is a major United States Army installation, in Cumberland and Hoke counties, North Carolina, U.S., mostly in Fayetteville but also partly in the town of Spring Lake. It was also a census-designated place in the 2010 census and had a population of 39,457. The fort is named for Confederate...
in the 756th Field Artillery
Field artillery
Field artillery is a category of mobile artillery used to support armies in the field. These weapons are specialized for mobility, tactical proficiency, long range, short range and extremely long range target engagement....
, then in the XVIII Airborne Corps. After the army, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis is a private research university located in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1853, and named for George Washington, the university has students and faculty from all fifty U.S. states and more than 110 nations...
until 1955, when he began earning a PhD at Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, studying under Harry Levin
Harry Levin
Harry Tuchman Levin was an American literary critic and scholar of modernism and comparative literature.-Biography:...
and Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...
.
Davenport befriended Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
during the poet’s incarceration in St. Elizabeths Hospital
St. Elizabeths Hospital
St. Elizabeths Hospital is a psychiatric hospital operated by the District of Columbia Department of Mental Health. It was the first large-scale, federally-run psychiatric hospital in the United States. Housing several thousand patients at its peak, St. Elizabeths had a fully functioning...
, visiting him annually from 1952 until Pound's release in 1958, and later at his home in Rapallo
Rapallo
Rapallo is a municipality in the province of Genoa, in Liguria, northern Italy. As of 2007 it counts approximately 34,000 inhabitants, it is part of the Tigullio Gulf and is located in between Portofino and Chiavari....
, Italy. Davenport described one such visit, in 1963, in the story "Ithaka". Davenport wrote his dissertation on Pound’s poetry, published as Cities on Hills in 1983.
After completing his Ph.D., he taught at Haverford College
Haverford College
Haverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia...
from 1961 to 1963 but soon took a position at the University of Kentucky
University of Kentucky
The University of Kentucky, also known as UK, is a public co-educational university and is one of the state's two land-grant universities, located in Lexington, Kentucky...
, "the remotest offer with the most pay" (as he wrote to Jonathan Williams
Jonathan Williams (poet)
Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...
). Davenport taught at Kentucky until he received a MacArthur Fellowship, which prompted his retirement at the end of 1990.
Davenport was married briefly in the early 1960s. He dedicated Eclogues, 1981, to "Bonnie Jean" (Cox), his companion from 1965 until his death. Other Davenport volumes dedicated to Cox include Objects on a Table, 1998, and The Death of Picasso, 2004. Cox became Trustee for the Guy Davenport Estate.
The range of Davenport's literary and artistic friendships was remarkable. In addition to Pound and Williams, Davenport knew Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner
William Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
, Laurence Scott, Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
, Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Christopher Middleton
Christopher Middleton (poet)
Christopher Middleton is a British poet and translator, especially of German literature.-Life:He was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford. He then held academic positions at the University of Zürich and King's College London. He became Professor of Germanic...
, Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. was a 20th century Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion...
, Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays...
, Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
, Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
, Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany
Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as "Chip" is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society.His science fiction novels include Babel-17, The Einstein...
, Robert Kelly
Robert Kelly (poet)
Robert Kelly is an American poet associated with the deep image group.-Early life and education:Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Jason and Margaret Rose Kelly née Kane, in 1935. He did his undergraduate studies at the City College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1955...
, James Laughlin
James Laughlin
James Laughlin was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishers.- Biography :He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry Hughart and Marjory Rea Laughlin...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage
James Stanley Brakhage , better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film....
, Ronald Johnson
Ronald Johnson (poet)
Ronald Johnson was an American poet. He was born in Ashland, Kansas, graduated from Columbia University and lived in New York in the late fifties, wandered around Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for the next twenty-five years before returning to Kansas,...
, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer, from Normal, Illinois.-Life & Career:Married to Madelyn McKinney, he moved to Lexington, Kentucky, to continue his trade as an optician. The company he worked for, Tinder-Krausse-Tinder also sold photographic equipment...
, his neighbor.
Two sentences he wrote about Meatyard apply to himself as well: "He was rare among American artists in that he was not obsessed with his own image in the world. He could therefore live in perfect privacy in a rotting Kentucky town."
In one of his essays, Davenport claimed to "live almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell's soup, and Snickers bars".
He died of lung cancer on January 4, 2005, in Lexington, Kentucky
Lexington, Kentucky
Lexington is the second-largest city in Kentucky and the 63rd largest in the US. Known as the "Thoroughbred City" and the "Horse Capital of the World", it is located in the heart of Kentucky's Bluegrass region...
.
Writing
Davenport began publishing fiction in 1970 with "The Aeroplanes at BresciaBrescia
Brescia is a city and comune in the region of Lombardy in northern Italy. It is situated at the foot of the Alps, between the Mella and the Naviglio, with a population of around 197,000. It is the second largest city in Lombardy, after the capital, Milan...
," which is based on Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
's visit to an air show in September 1909. His books include Tatlin
Vladimir Tatlin
Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin was a Russian and Soviet painter and architect. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Russian avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he later became the most important artist in the Constructivist movement...
!, Da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
's Bicycle, Eclogue
Eclogue
An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.The form of the word in contemporary English is taken from French eclogue, from Old French, from Latin ecloga...
s, Apples and Pears, The Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
Steam Balloon, The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devon
Devon
Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...
shire Fusilier
Fusilier
Fusilier was originally the name of a soldier armed with a light flintlock musket called the fusil. The word was first used around 1680, and has later developed into a regimental designation.-History:...
s, A Table of Green Fields, The Cardiff
Cardiff
Cardiff is the capital, largest city and most populous county of Wales and the 10th largest city in the United Kingdom. The city is Wales' chief commercial centre, the base for most national cultural and sporting institutions, the Welsh national media, and the seat of the National Assembly for...
Team, and Wo es war, soll ich werden. His fiction uses three general modes of exposition: the fictionalizing of historical events and figures; the foregrounding of formal narrative experiments, especially with the use of collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
; and the depicting of a Fourierist
Charles Fourier
François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society...
utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
, where small groups of men, women, and children have eliminated the separation between mind and body.
The first of more than four hundred Davenport essays, articles, introductions, and book reviews appeared while he was still an undergraduate; the last, just weeks before his death. Davenport was a regular reviewer for National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
and The Hudson Review
The Hudson Review
The Hudson Review is a quarterly journal of literature and the arts. It was founded in 1947 in New York by William Ayers Arrowsmith, Joseph Deericks Bennett, and George Frederick Morgan. The first issue was introduced in the spring of 1948...
, and, late in his life, at the invitation of John Jeremiah Sullivan
John Jeremiah Sullivan
John Jeremiah Sullivan is an American writer and editor. He is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, and southern editor of The Paris Review.-Biography:...
, he spent a year writing the "New Books" column for Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
. His essays range from literary to social topics, from brief book reviews to lectures such as the title piece in his first collection of essays, The Geography of the Imagination. His other collections of essays were Every Force Evolves a Form and The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art.
He also published two slim volumes on art: A Balthus
Balthus
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola , best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist....
Notebook and Objects on a Table. Although he wrote on many topics, Davenport, who never had a driver's license, was especially passionate about the destruction of American cities by the automobile.
Davenport published a handful of poems. The longest are the book-length Flowers and Leaves, an intricate meditation on art and America, and "The Resurrection in Cookham
Cookham
Cookham is a village and civil parish in the north-easternmost corner of Berkshire in England, on the River Thames, notable as the home of the artist Stanley Spencer. It lies north of Maidenhead close to the border with Buckinghamshire...
Churchyard" (borrowing the title from a painting by Stanley Spencer
Stanley Spencer
Sir Stanley Spencer was an English painter. Much of his work depicts Biblical scenes, from miracles to Crucifixion, happening not in the Holy Land but in the small Thames-side village where he was born and spent most of his life...
). A selection of his poems and translations was published as Thasos
Thasos
Thasos or Thassos is a Greek island in the northern Aegean Sea, close to the coast of Thrace and the plain of the river Nestos but geographically part of Macedonia. It is the northernmost Greek island, and 12th largest by area...
and Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...
.
Davenport translated ancient Greek texts, particularly from the archaic
Archaic period in Greece
The Archaic period in Greece was a period of ancient Greek history that followed the Greek Dark Ages. This period saw the rise of the polis and the founding of colonies, as well as the first inklings of classical philosophy, theatre in the form of tragedies performed during Dionysia, and written...
period. These were published in periodicals, then small volumes, and finally collected in 7 Greeks. He also translated the occasional other piece, including a few poems of Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
's, some ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
ian texts [after Boris de Rachewiltz
Boris de Rachewiltz
Prince Boris de Rachewiltz was an Italian-Russian Egyptologist and writer on Africa and the ancient world. He studied Egyptology at the Pontifical Biblical Institute ....
]), and, with Benjamin Urrutia
Benjamín Urrutia
Benjamin Urrutia is an author and scholar. With Guy Davenport, Urrutia edited The Logia of Yeshua, which collected what Urrutia and Davenport consider to be Jesus' authentic sayings from a variety of canonical and non-canonical sources...
, the sayings of Jesus, published as The Logia
Logia
In New Testament scholarship, the term logia is a term applied to collections of sayings credited to Jesus. Such a collection of sayings of Jesus are believed to be referred to by Papias of Hierapolis...
of Yeshua
Yeshua (name)
Yeshua, was a common alternative form of the name Joshua "Yehoshuah" in later books of the Hebrew Bible and among Jews of the Second Temple Period...
.
Visual art
With his childhood newspaper, Davenport launched both his literary and artistic vocations. The former remained dormant or sporadic for some time while the latter, "making drawings, watercolors, and gouacheGouache
Gouache[p], also spelled guache, the name of which derives from the Italian guazzo, water paint, splash or bodycolor is a type of paint consisting of pigment suspended in water. A binding agent, usually gum arabic, is also present, just as in watercolor...
s, [continued] throughout school, the army, and his early years as a teacher." He drew or painted nearly every day of his life, and his notebooks contain drawings and pasted-in illustrations and photos cheek by jowl with his own observations and other writings and quotations from others.
From college forward, Davenport supplied cover art and decorations to literary periodicals. He also supplied illustrations for others' books, notably two by Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner
William Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
: The Stoic Comedians (1962) and The Counterfeiters (1968).
In 1965 Davenport and Laurence Scott prepared and printed Pound's Canto CX in an edition of 118 copies, 80 of which they presented to Pound for his 80th birthday. The previous year they had produced Ezra's Bowmen of Shu
Shu
Shu may refer to:*Shū ** , Japanese Kanji.*Shu * 蜀 , an abbreviation of Sichuan province of the People's Republic of China, as well as the following historical regimes that have existed in this region:...
on the same press, a double broadside that published for the first time, with a brief introductory essay by Davenport, a drawing by sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a French sculptor who developed a rough hewn, primitive style of direct carving....
and a letter of Gaudier's from the trenches of World War I that cites Pound's poem (translated from one in the Shi Jing
Shi Jing
The Classic of Poetry , translated variously as the Book of Songs, the Book of Odes, and often known simply as its original name The Odes, is the earliest existing collection of Chinese poems and songs. It comprises 305 poems and songs, with many range from the 10th to the 7th centuries BC...
) "The Song of the Bowmen of Shu".
Many of Davenport's earlier stories are combinations of pictures and text, especially Tatlin! and Apples and Pears (where some of the illustrations are of pages that resemble those of his own notebooks).
"It was my intention, when I began writing fiction several years ago, to construct texts that were both written and drawn.... I continued this method right through Apples and Pears... The designer [of A+P] understood [my] collages to be gratuitous illustrations having nothing to do with anything, reduced them all to burnt toast, framed them with nonsensical lines, and sabotaged my whole enterprise. I took this as final defeat, and haven't tried to combine drawing and writing in any later work of fiction."
Fiction
- TatlinVladimir TatlinVladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin was a Russian and Soviet painter and architect. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Russian avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he later became the most important artist in the Constructivist movement...
!: Six Stories (Scribner's, 1974) (with illustrations by Davenport) - Da VinciLeonardo da VinciLeonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
's Bicycle: Ten Stories (University of Chicago Press, 1979) (with illustrations by Davenport) - EclogueEclogueAn eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.The form of the word in contemporary English is taken from French eclogue, from Old French, from Latin ecloga...
s: Eight Stories (North Point Press, 1981) (two stories illustrated by Roy Behrens) - Trois Caprices (The Pace Trust, 1981) (three stories later collected in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon)
- The Bowmen of ShuShu (state)The State of Shu was an ancient state in what is now Sichuan, China. It was conquered by Qin in 316 BC. Shu was based on the Chengdu Plain, in the western Sichuan basin with some extension northeast to the upper Han River valley. To the east was the Ba tribal confederation. Further east down the...
(The Grenfell Press, 1984) (limited ed., collected in Apples and Pears) - Apples and Pears and Other Stories (North Point Press, 1984) (with illustrations by Davenport)
- The Bicycle Rider (Red Ozier Press, 1985) (limited ed., later collected—in a different version—in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon)
- JonahJonahJonah is the name given in the Hebrew Bible to a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel in about the 8th century BC, the eponymous central character in the Book of Jonah, famous for being swallowed by a fish or a whale, depending on translation...
: A Story (Nadja Press, 1986) (limited ed., later collected in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon) - The Jules VerneJules VerneJules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
Steam Balloon: Nine Stories (North Point Press, 1987) - The Drummer of the Eleventh North DevonDevonDevon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...
shire FusilierFusilierFusilier was originally the name of a soldier armed with a light flintlock musket called the fusil. The word was first used around 1680, and has later developed into a regimental designation.-History:...
s (North Point Press, 1990) - The LarkLarkLarks are passerine birds of the family Alaudidae. All species occur in the Old World, and in northern and eastern Australia; only one, the Shore Lark, has spread to North America, where it is called the Horned Lark...
(Dim Gray Bar Press, 1993) (limited ed., illustrated by Davenport) - A Table of Green Fields: Ten Stories (New Directions, 1993)
- The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories (New Directions, 1996)
- Twelve Stories (Counterpoint, 1997) (selections from Tatlin!, Apples and Pears, and The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers)
- The Death of PicassoPablo PicassoPablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
: New and Selected Writing (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003) (contains seven essays [three previously uncollected] along with nineteen stories [two previously uncollected] and one play) - Wo es war, soll ich werden: The Restored Original Text (Finial Press, 2004) (limited ed.) http://www.guydavenport.com/
Translations
- Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of ArchilochosArchilochusArchilochus, or, Archilochos While these have been the generally accepted dates since Felix Jacoby, "The Date of Archilochus," Classical Quarterly 35 97-109, some scholars disagree; Robin Lane Fox, for instance, in Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer , p...
(University of California Press, 1964) - SapphoSapphoSappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
: Songs and Fragments (University of Michigan Press, 1965) - Herakleitos and DiogenesDiogenes of SinopeDiogenes the Cynic was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy. Also known as Diogenes of Sinope , he was born in Sinope , an Ionian colony on the Black Sea , in 412 or 404 BCE and died at Corinth in 323 BCE.Diogenes of Sinope was a controversial figure...
(Grey Fox Press, 1979) - The Mimes of HerondasHerodasthumb|The first column of the Herodas papyrus, showing Mimiamb 1. 1–15.Herodas , or Herondas , was a Greek poet and the author of short humorous dramatic scenes in verse, written under the Alexandrian empire in the 3rd century BC.Apart from the intrinsic merit of these pieces, they are...
(Grey Fox Press, 1981) - Maxims of the Ancient Egyptians (The Pace Trust, 1983) (from Boris de RachewiltzBoris de RachewiltzPrince Boris de Rachewiltz was an Italian-Russian Egyptologist and writer on Africa and the ancient world. He studied Egyptology at the Pontifical Biblical Institute ....
's Massime degli antichi egiziani, 1954) - Anakreon (The University of Alabama/ Parallel Editions, 1991)
- ArchilochosArchilochusArchilochus, or, Archilochos While these have been the generally accepted dates since Felix Jacoby, "The Date of Archilochus," Classical Quarterly 35 97-109, some scholars disagree; Robin Lane Fox, for instance, in Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer , p...
, SapphoSapphoSappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
, AlkmanAlcmanAlcman was an Ancient Greek choral lyric poet from Sparta. He is the earliest representative of the Alexandrinian canon of the nine lyric poets.- Family :...
: Three Lyric Poets (University of California Press, 1980) (adds Alkman to Carmina Archilochi and Sappho: Songs and Fragments) - The LogiaLogiaIn New Testament scholarship, the term logia is a term applied to collections of sayings credited to Jesus. Such a collection of sayings of Jesus are believed to be referred to by Papias of Hierapolis...
of YeshuaYeshuaYeshua, was a common alternative form of the name Joshua "Yehoshuah" in later books of the Hebrew Bible and among Jews of the Second Temple Period...
: The Sayings of Jesus (Counterpoint, 1996) (with Benjamin UrrutiaBenjamín UrrutiaBenjamin Urrutia is an author and scholar. With Guy Davenport, Urrutia edited The Logia of Yeshua, which collected what Urrutia and Davenport consider to be Jesus' authentic sayings from a variety of canonical and non-canonical sources...
) - 7 Greeks (New Directions, 1995) (revises and collects the texts—but none of Davenport's drawings—from Carmina Archilochi, Sappho: Songs and Fragments, Herakleitos and Diogenes, The Mimes of Herondas, Anakreon, and Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman)
Poetry
- Cydonia Florentia (The Lowell-Adams House Printers/Laurence Scott, 1966)
- Flowers and Leaves: Poema vel Sonata, Carmina Autumni Primaeque Veris Transformationem (Nantahala Foundation/Jonathan Williams, 1966; Bamberger Books, 1991) (illustrated by Davenport)
- The Resurrection in CookhamCookhamCookham is a village and civil parish in the north-easternmost corner of Berkshire in England, on the River Thames, notable as the home of the artist Stanley Spencer. It lies north of Maidenhead close to the border with Buckinghamshire...
Churchyard (Jordan Davies, 1982) - Goldfinch Thistle Star (Red Ozier Press, 1983) (illustrated by Lachlan Stewart)
- ThasosThasosThasos or Thassos is a Greek island in the northern Aegean Sea, close to the coast of Thrace and the plain of the river Nestos but geographically part of Macedonia. It is the northernmost Greek island, and 12th largest by area...
and Ohio: Poems and Translations, 1950–1980 (North Point Press, 1986) (includes most of Flowers and Leaves, along with translations of six of the "7 Greeks" and of Rainer Maria RilkeRainer Maria RilkeRené Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
and Harold Schimmel)
Fugitive pieces
Davenport wrote introductions or contributions to many books:- Jack Sharpless's Presences of Mind
- Stan BrakhageStan BrakhageJames Stanley Brakhage , better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film....
's Film Biographies - Will McBrideWill McBride (photographer)Will McBride is a photographer in reportage, art photography and book illustration. He is also known as a painter and sculptor....
's Coming of Age - Paul CadmusPaul CadmusPaul Cadmus was an American artist. He is best known for his paintings and drawings of nude male figures. His works combined elements of eroticism and social critique to produce a style often called magic realism...
's The Drawings of Paul Cadmus (1989) - Charles Burchfield's Charles Burchfield's Seasons
- Simon Dinnerstein's Paintings and Drawings
- Anne CarsonAnne CarsonAnne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980-1987....
's Glass, Irony, and God - Jonathan WilliamsJonathan Williams (poet)Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...
's Palpable Elysium, Ear in Bartram's Tree, Elite/Elate Poems, and tribute to Edward DahlbergEdward DahlbergEdward Dahlberg was an American novelist, essayist and autobiographer. -Background:Edward Dahlberg was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Elizabeth Dahlberg. Together mother and son led a vagabond existence, until 1905 when she operated the Star Lady Barbershop in Kansas City... - Lenard D. Moore's Forever Home
- Paul MetcalfPaul MetcalfPaul Metcalf was an American writer. He wrote in verse and prose, but his work generally defies classification. Its small but devoted following includes Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds...
's Collected Works, Volume 1 - Jonathan Greene's tribute to Jonathan Williams, JW/50
- Daniel Haberman's Lug of Days to Come
- Burton RaffelBurton RaffelBurton Raffel is a translator, a poet and a teacher. He has translated many poems, including the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, poems by Horace, and Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. In 1964, Raffel recorded an album along with Robert P...
's Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments - James LaughlinJames LaughlinJames Laughlin was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishers.- Biography :He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry Hughart and Marjory Rea Laughlin...
's Man in the Wall - Vladimir NabokovVladimir NabokovVladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
's Lectures on Don Quixote - Ralph Eugene MeatyardRalph Eugene MeatyardRalph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer, from Normal, Illinois.-Life & Career:Married to Madelyn McKinney, he moved to Lexington, Kentucky, to continue his trade as an optician. The company he worked for, Tinder-Krausse-Tinder also sold photographic equipment...
's Father Louie and Ralph Eugene Meatyard - ApertureAperture (magazine)Aperture is a quarterly photography magazine and a book publisher based in New York, New York. The magazine is published by Aperture Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to fine art photography.-Magazine:...
s monographs on Eudora WeltyEudora WeltyEudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
's and Ralph Eugene Meatyard's photographs - The University of VirginiaUniversity of VirginiaThe University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
's small monograph on Lafcadio HearnLafcadio HearnPatrick Lafcadio Hearn , known also by the Japanese name , was an international writer, known best for his books about Japan, especially his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things...
, The Art of Lafcadio Hearn (1983) - Charles L. Rubin's collection Junk Food (1980)
- Elizabeth Turner Hutton's Americans in Paris (1921–31): Man RayMan RayMan Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
, Gerald Murphy, Stuart DavisStuart Davis (painter)Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
, and Alexander CalderAlexander CalderAlexander Calder was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing mobile sculptures. In addition to mobile and stable sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.-Childhood:Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton,... - Riva Castleman's Art of the Forties
- Ronald JohnsonRonald Johnson (poet)Ronald Johnson was an American poet. He was born in Ashland, Kansas, graduated from Columbia University and lived in New York in the late fifties, wandered around Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for the next twenty-five years before returning to Kansas,...
's Ark: The Foundations and Valley of Many-Colored Grasses - O. HenryO. HenryO. Henry was the pen name of the American writer William Sydney Porter . O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.-Early life:...
's Cabbages and Kings and Selected Stories (which he also edited) - Davenport's own selection of Louis AgassizLouis AgassizJean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
's scientific writings, The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz.
Some of these pieces were included in Davenport's collections of essays.
Commentary and essays
- The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (Beacon Press, 1963)
- Pennant Key-Indexed Study Guide to HomerHomerIn the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
's The IliadIliadThe Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
(Educational Research Associates, 1967) - Pennant Key-Indexed Study Guide to HomerHomerIn the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
's The OdysseyOdysseyThe Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
(Educational Research Associates, 1967) - The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. (North Point Press, 1981)
- Cities on Hills: A Study of I – XXX of Ezra PoundEzra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
's Cantos (UMI Research, 1983) - Charles Burchfield's Seasons (Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994)
- The Drawings of Paul CadmusPaul CadmusPaul Cadmus was an American artist. He is best known for his paintings and drawings of nude male figures. His works combined elements of eroticism and social critique to produce a style often called magic realism...
(Rizzoli, 1989) - Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays (North Point Press, 1987)
- A BalthusBalthusBalthasar Klossowski de Rola , best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist....
Notebook (The Ecco Press, 1989) - The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Counterpoint, 1996)
- Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (Counterpoint, 1998)
Paintings and drawings
- A Balance of QuinceQuinceThe quince , or Cydonia oblonga, is the sole member of the genus Cydonia and native to warm-temperate southwest Asia in the Caucasus region...
s: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport, with an essay by Erik Anderson ReeceErik ReeceErik Reece is an American writer, the author of two acclaimed books of nonfiction - Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalacchia and An American Gospel: On Family, History, and The Kingdom of God - and numerous essays and magazine...
(New Directions, 1996) - 50 Drawings (Dim Gray Bar Press, 1996) (limited ed.) Introduction by Davenport gives an account of the role drawing and painting played in his life.
- Joan Crane's Davenport bibliography (see below) includes a 25-page insert of reproductions that suggest the range of his drawing styles.
- Two books by Hugh KennerHugh KennerWilliam Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...
, The Counterfeiters and The StoicSTOICSTOIC was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs...
Comedians, include Davenport's crosshatched crow quill and ink work, ten full-page drawings in each.
Letters
- A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters 1964–1968, ed. Thomas Meyer (Green Shade, 2004). Selected correspondence with Jonathan WilliamsJonathan Williams (poet)Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...
- Fragments from a Correspondence, ed. Nicholas Kilmer (ARION, Winter 2006, 89–129)
- Selected Letters: Guy Davenport and James LaughlinJames LaughlinJames Laughlin was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishers.- Biography :He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry Hughart and Marjory Rea Laughlin...
, ed. W. C. Bamberger (W. W. Norton, 2007)
Criticism, reviews, and interviews
- Alpert, Barry (ed.). "Guy Davenport / Ronald Johnson". VORT 9, 1976.
- Bawer, Bruce. "Wise guy". Bookforum, April 2005. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Wise+guy%3a+Bruce+Bawer+on+Guy+Davenpor+(1927-2005)-a0131433367
- Cahill, Christopher. "Prose" (The Cardiff Team and The Hunter Gracchus). Boston Review, April/May 1997.
- Cohen, Paul. "Art in the Soviet Union: Davenport's Visual Critique in 'Tatlin!'". Mosaic, 1985.
- Cozy, David. "Knowledge as Delight / the fiction of Guy Davenport", RainTaxi, Fall 2002.
- ———. "A Plain Modernist" (The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing). The Threepenny Review, Summer 2004.
- ———. "Guy Davenport". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2005.
- Delany, Samuel R.Samuel R. DelanySamuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as "Chip" is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society.His science fiction novels include Babel-17, The Einstein...
. "The 'Gay Writer' / 'Gay Writing'...?" in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (Wesleyan University Press, 1999). - Dillon, Patrick. "Dimensions of Erewhon: The Modern Orpheus in Guy Davenport's 'The Dawn in Erewhon'". CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal (University of Pennsylvania, 2006). http://repository.upenn.edu/curej/23
- Dirda, Michael. "Guy Davenport," in Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments (W.W. Norton, 2000).
- Furlani, Andre. "A Postmodern Utopia Of Childhood Sexuality: The Fiction Of Guy Davenport", in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
- ———. Guy Davenport: Postmodernism and After (Northwestern University Press, 2007).
- Kelly, Robert. Interview on Guy Davenport. The Brooklyn Rail, July 2005
- Mason, WyattWyatt Mason-Background and education:Mason was raised in Manhattan. He attended The Fieldston School in New York, the University of Pennsylvania, and also studied literature at Columbia University and the University of Paris.-Career:...
. "There Must I Begin to Be: Guy Davenport's Heretical Fictions". Harper's Magazine, April 2004. - Quartermain, Peter. "Writing as AssemblageAssemblageAn assemblage is an archaeological term meaning a group of different artifacts found in association with one another, that is, in the same context...
/ Guy Davenport" in Disjunctive PoeticsPoeticsAristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory...
(Cambridge University Press, 1992). - Shannon, John (ed.). "A Symposium on Guy Davenport". Margins 13, August–September 1974.
- Zachar, Laurence. "L'écriture de Guy Davenport, fragments et fractals". Lille : A.N.R.T. Université de Lille III, 1996. OCLC: 70116807. (Zachar's thesis is in French, but extensive interview material and letters appear in English in an appendix, 426–488.)
Published bibliography
- Crane, Joan. Guy Davenport: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1947–1995 (Green Shade, 1996).
External links
- New Criterion obituary ($), Feb 2005.
- "When Novelists Become Cubists: The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport". (Style, Spring 2002)
- "Guy Davenport as Translator". (National Post, 19 August 2004.)
- A review of Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia's translation of the sayings of Jesus
- Roy R. Behrens: A Designer Remembers the Writer Guy Davenport
- "Let the Song Lie in the Thing", n+1's poem in memory of Davenport
- Charles Ralston's website on Guy Davenport
- Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (2006), a 500-page scholarly volume that considers Davenport in its conclusion (the author has made this volume available in a free, open-access PDF version).
- "Het nieuve wereldbeeld: The Magical World of Guy Davenport" by Gilbert Purdy
- Robert Kelly and David Levi Strauss on Guy Davenport (1927—2005)