Accordingly, a rumination on cave painting is also a reflection on Pablo Picasso; a musing on the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin is also a meditation on labyrinths….

If reality can be pictured in words, words must be seen as a set of essences in parallel series to the world. Even more, you stand in awe of the connections he can make between the archaic and the modern; he makes the remote familiar and the familiar fundamental.

Before the internet, Google, and hyperlinks, Guy Davenport was the original polymath, perhaps the last great American polymath, who provided the links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present. A page of Mandelstam's prose is a kind of algebra of ironies over which the same hand has drawn comic furniture and objects with a life of their own a la Chagall. So it was strange to read Davenport calmly, humbly, almost professorially explicating the ideogrammatic densities and “architectonic” collages of Pound and Olson, Marianne Moore and Paul Metcalf, without dropping even a hint that he is a part of their lineage, playing in the same league. It was wonderful learning about some new poets: Ronald Johnson features on my immediate horizon and I may now have sufficient impetus to purse Hugh Kenner's magnum opus. It's not a profound observation in itself, but in his hands he showcases the variety of subtleties that each translator employs in his spin on the language of the original.

And that’s one of the marks of great literature — even after half a dozen readings, it still holds your attention, and you’re still aha-ing over things you missed the last time around. 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. He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization, which are apparently entirely contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena.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. The geography of the imagination would be a third construing of cultural divisions, showing, for instance, the areas of the portrait, the epic, the novel, the symphony.