I wish every English teacher read this book and shared the insights with their students -- hopefully with shades of enthusiasm and passion like Guy Davenport. Davenport wears his erudition -- even abstruseness -- like a badge, but without the arrogance that one would expect. 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. Because of this collapse (which may yet prove to be a long interruption), the architectonic masters of our time have suffered critical neglect or abuse, and if admired are admired for anything but the structural innovations of the work.

It is like being in the room with a charmingly intelligent man who has found a big subject in several hundred books. Reading these essays is like getting a short master class in each topic, while being in the presence of an extraordinary prose style. Kate Colby's sixth book is a personal ars poetica that looks back on her previous work and asks what she meant to say, what she keeps meaning to, and how to mean more. These are poets (Pound, Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson, among others) and their poems that the author expects us to be quite familiar with already, and honestly, many of these sections were over my head. We brought many things across the Atlantic, and the Pacific; many things we left behind: a critical choice to live with forever.

It’s shortsighted of Disney not to have built an amusement park: College World, with fraternities, sororities, sports, endless partying, but no classes or library or labs. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. He was a professor of English for three decades, having taught at Haverford College and the University of Kentucky.

But that is why I enjoy books like this, they are worth reading because they expand my appreciation for the beauty and depth of language, books, and the imagination. Both poems were printed there in their stages of creation - one a work of now recognised genius, the other to receive only a crumb of attention, as both were subsequently printed together in a newspaper and now perhaps again here, in this essay. 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.

In these forty essays, spanning the length of a distinguished career, one of America’s major literary critics elucidates an astonishing range of literary history with both wit and wisdom. He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, ‘a perfect balance of spirit and information. McLuhan famously argued that electronic media was creating a global village in which books would become obsolete. 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. Davenport makes a strong case for the poets he believes in, poetry, for me, is only a slight interest, and I think it's important to note that the book's first half is almost exclusively about poets and their work.