Being fair, I likely rounded up as I think this would've been pristine were it 31 or 32 essays rather than 40. Davenport published over 40 books, among them collections of short stories, translations from the Greek, illustrated works, a novel, and critical studies on literature, culture, and art. The Geography of the Imagination is a book I often bring with me when I travel because no matter my mood, there’s usually an essay to suit it and because so many of the essays bear reading a third or even a fourth time.

In a wonderful essay on Davenport, the critic Wyatt Mason proposes that his short stories are answers to the question, “What if we were free? Not only has he seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also has the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to make the connections, to see how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization.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. He brings a sort of geological perspective to literature, a sense (in John McPhee’s phrase) of “deep time” that you don’t often find in American letters. 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. It seems that a way with the suggestive fragment, the connective anecdote—“let the song lie in the thing! And for all his suspicion of modernity, with its spewing cars and its squawking televisions, he also believed that it had furnished us with the resources to rescue ourselves.

He voted Democratic until he veered leftward and cast a ballot for Ralph Nader, but he was a regular contributor to the conservative National Review, mostly because the editors there let him say what he wanted about the books he loved. Within a few miles of each other in the 1880s, Whitman was putting the last touches to his great book, Eadweard Muybridge was photographing movements milliseconds apart of animals, naked athletes, and women, and Thomas Eakins was painting surgeons, boxers, musicians, wrestlers, and Philadelphians.No need for everyone to learn Provencal but maybe someone should consider the merits of Auden or Gruppe 47?