Guy Davenport

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Guy Davenport : biography

November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005

Translations

  • Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochos (University of California Press, 1964)
  • Sappho: Songs and Fragments (University of Michigan Press, 1965)
  • Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979)
  • The Mimes of Herondas (Grey Fox Press, 1981)
  • Maxims of the Ancient Egyptians (The Pace Trust, 1983) (from Boris de Rachewiltz’s Massime degli antichi egiziani, 1954)
  • Anakreon (The University of Alabama/ Parallel Editions, 1991)
  • Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman: Three Lyric Poets (University of California Press, 1980) (adds Alkman to Carmina Archilochi and Sappho: Songs and Fragments)
  • The Logia of Yeshua: The Sayings of Jesus (Counterpoint, 1996) (with Benjamin Urrutia)
  • 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 Cookham Churchyard (Jordan Davies, 1982)
  • Goldfinch Thistle Star (Red Ozier Press, 1983) (illustrated by Lachlan Stewart)
  • Thasos 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 Rilke and Harold Schimmel)

Fugitive pieces

Davenport wrote introductions or contributions to many books:

  • Jack Sharpless’s Presences of Mind
  • Stan Brakhage’s Film Biographies
  • Will McBride’s Coming of Age
  • Paul Cadmus’s The Drawings of Paul Cadmus (1989)
  • Charles Burchfield’s Charles Burchfield’s Seasons
  • Simon Dinnerstein’s Paintings and Drawings
  • Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God
  • Jonathan Williams’s Palpable Elysium, Ear in Bartram’s Tree, Elite/Elate Poems, and tribute to Edward Dahlberg
  • Lenard D. Moore’s Forever Home
  • Paul Metcalf’s Collected Works, Volume 1
  • Jonathan Greene’s tribute to Jonathan Williams, JW/50
  • Daniel Haberman’s Lug of Days to Come
  • Burton Raffel’s Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments
  • James Laughlin’s Man in the Wall
  • Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote
  • Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Father Louie and Ralph Eugene Meatyard
  • Aperture’s monographs on Eudora Welty’s and Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s photographs
  • The University of Virginia’s small monograph on Lafcadio Hearn, The Art of Lafcadio Hearn (1983)
  • Charles L. Rubin’s collection Junk Food (1980)
  • Elizabeth Turner Hutton’s Americans in Paris (1921–31): Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, and Alexander Calder
  • Riva Castleman’s Art of the Forties
  • Ronald Johnson’s Ark: The Foundations and Valley of Many-Colored Grasses
  • O. Henry’s Cabbages and Kings and Selected Stories (which he also edited)
  • Davenport’s own selection of Louis Agassiz’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 Homer’s The Iliad (Educational Research Associates, 1967)
  • Pennant Key-Indexed Study Guide to Homer’s The Odyssey (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 Pound’s Cantos (UMI Research, 1983)
  • Charles Burchfield’s Seasons (Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994)
  • The Drawings of Paul Cadmus (Rizzoli, 1989)
  • Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays (North Point Press, 1987)
  • A Balthus 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 Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport, with an essay by Erik Anderson Reece (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 Kenner, The Counterfeiters and The Stoic 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 Williams
  • Fragments from a Correspondence, ed. Nicholas Kilmer (ARION, Winter 2006, 89–129)
  • Selected Letters: Guy Davenport and James Laughlin, ed. W. C. Bamberger (W. W. Norton, 2007)