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My first job after college was working as a clerk at a bookstore. I had spent several months after graduating living on my dwindling savings, seeing if I could make a living as a freelance writer. As my bank balance neared zero, I resigned myself to look for honest work, and found a job at a bookstore in the city. Over the next four years, I recommended hundreds of books to customers, usually in response to the question, “I like X; what else I should read?” I enjoyed the challenge of connecting a book buyer between some beloved book just finished and some new treasure, by an author new to the customer.

In the two decades since I stopped selling books, I’ve recommended many other books to friends and family. Sometimes what I offer just doesn’t fit the reader, but more often than not, the asker appreciates the suggestion. There is one book, however, that I have recommended repeatedly through the years that, as far as I know, no one has ever followed up by buying or borrowing. It is one of my touchstone books, the book I would probably grab first if my bookcase were on fire. (Whether I would actually grab any books from my shelves if there were a fire is doubtful, but that’s grist for another essay).

The book is Guy Davenport’s collection of essays, The Geography of the Imagination. The edition I have is the first edition paperback from North Point Press, published in 1981.

Davenport (1927-2205) was a writer, artist, lecturer and friend of some of the unique artists and writers in the twentieth century. I first learned about Davenport because I liked anything that North Point Press was publishing back in the 1980s. Their sturdy trade paperbacks with dust jackets were unique. I bought every new title that came from North Point, my first introduction to writers like Davenport, Evan Connell, M.F.K. Fisher, Wendell Berry and Annie Lamott, to name a few.

I read Davenport’s collection of forty essays when I was at a vulnerable and ripe time of my reading life. A new undergraduate, I had no interest in going to graduate school, and yet I knew I had large gaps in my traditional liberal arts education. At the time, I looked at my recently finished formal education as several silos of knowledge—a little European literature here, a little economics here, a little philosophy here, and lots of journalistic who/what/when/why/how writing.

Davenport’s book was a wonder because he wove together strands of literature and art and history and cultural oddities from the dawn of time to the twentieth century in these engaging essays. In the essays, written over a period of twenty-five years, Davenport returns to similar themes. More than once, he writes that the twentieth century ended in 1916 on the battlefields of World War One. His point is that some of the most creative people in the arts and literature died on those battlefields, and that the deaths of those individuals and overall savagery of the war stifled what Davenport saw as a nascent renaissance in arts and letters. Although Davenport’s reading is enthusiastically deep, he’s really a classicist at heart.

I don’t think I’ve actually read every essay in the book, though I pull it off its shelf two or three times a year to re-read an old favorite or something new. A large chunk of the text is devoted to essays on specific poets—Walt Whitman, Charles Olson, Louis Zukovsky, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson. Each of these essays weaves together critical writing, biography, history, and the interconnectedness of these poets with other poets and writers and artists from other eras. Since as a rule I don’t read poetry, reading these essays is just about as close as I get to figuring out what is for me still the strange language of poetry.

• Davenport’s book is sprinkled with literary anecdotes.
• Davenport once took a class on the Anglo-Saxon language from J.R.R. Tolkien. He hated the class, but later learned from a mutual acquaintance in Kentucky that Tolkien derived many of the place names and character names for his Lord of the Rings trilogy from towns in rural Kentucky. 
• Davenport related that when Thomas Jefferson was retired to Monticello, he invited undergraduates of the University of Virginia to dinner two at a time, in alphabetical order. Edgar Allan Poe was an undergraduate at the time but, as Davenport writes, “P is deep in the alphabet; Poe was expelled and the old man dead before the two [men] could face each other over a plate of Virginia ham.”

• Poe’s mother was the first actress to play the role of Ophelia on an American stage.

Poe is one part of the unlikely trio of writers who rise above all others in Davenport’s pantheon—the others being Ezra Pound and Eudora Welty. Davenport devotes four essays to Pound’s life and work. Gathered in the middle of the book, they demonstrate (to me at least) that Pound is the fulcrum of American literature, balancing the classics of the past with the new forms of writing that Pound championed throughout his life (and Davenport continued championing after Pound’s death). Pound makes guest appearances in several other essays in the collection.

Poe is one of the centerpieces of the title essay, the one that I read most from this collection. In The Geography of the Imagination, Davenport makes the enigmatic statement, “The imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it.” Later he adds, “Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his earliest vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all skills of the imagination.”

In the essay, he describes the United States as fertile ground in which immigrants planted the culture of their home countries and civilizations and made something new. He goes to great lengths to describe how the works of Poe incorporated elements of the grotesque (or gothic, from Northern Europe), the arabesque (from the Middle East and the Orient) and the classical (from ancient Greece and Rome).

Poe’s imagination was perfectly at home in geographies he had no knowledge of except what his imagination appropriated from other writers. We might assume, in ignorance, that he knew Paris like a Parisian, that Italy and Spain were familiar to him, and even Antarctica and the face of the moon.

Then Davenport provides a fascinating dissection of Grant Wood’s iconic 1929 painting “American Gothic.” Davenport describes how every element of the painting—from the style of architecture of the farmhouse, to the clothes the couple wears, to the pitchfork in the man’s hand—is rooted in ages past. He describes the farm wife thusly:

She is a product of the ages, this modest Iowa farm wife: she has the hair-do of a medieval Madonna, a Reformation collar, a Greek cameo, a nineteenth-century pinafore.

Martin Luther put her a step behind her husband; John Know squared her shoulders; the stock market crash of 1929 put that look in her eyes.

Although Poe and Wood share the bulk of Davenport’s attention in this twelve-page essay, Davenport seamlessly weaves in mentions of Bach, John Philip Sousa, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dogon folk tales, Brer Rabbit, Heraclites, Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Thomas Love Peacock, Louis Agassiz, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valery, Sappho, Lord Byron, Oswald Spengler, James Joyce, Carlo Collodi, and O. Henry.

As should now be obvious, Davenport was not much interested in contemporary fiction, although in an essay from the 1970s he referred to Welty as the world’s greatest living writer. Welty is the focus of one of the longest essays in the book, “That Faire Field of Enna,” in which Davenport, among other things, ties the plots and names and themes of several Welty stories to myths from ancient Greece and Wales and other countries. This essay also ties in the theme of the title:

We need a geography of the imagination to understand the appearance and significance of cultural vernaculars beyond their origins. Such a geography would find among its concerns the continuity of culture into civilization, its transformation there, and the physiology of its integration.

Heady stuff, yes. But as a nascent writer of fiction, I listened intently to Davenport’s message, even as I struggled to put it into practice. While I knew that I could never have the depth of knowledge of the ancient classics (several of which Davenport translated himself) or the keen sense of relating a Greek myth to the stories spun by a Mississippi native writing in the twentieth century, I understood a broader and simpler message—that writers and artists pull their inspiration from across time and oceans and mountains, to create their new works of imagination. It’s a challenge I make with myself—which probably indicates why I have the works of so many dead white males on my bookshelves and so few titles by living writers. I’m still trying to learn from the past.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Geography of the Imagination


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he writes for pleasure. Over the last several months, he has re-read some of his favorite books and written a series of essays about why these books remain important to him, even decades after the first read them. Contact Paul.