Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on… — Guy Davenport Copy Share Image
I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all the evidence indicates that I was. — Guy Davenport Copy Share Image
“Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.” — Guy Davenport Copy Share Image
The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another… — Guy Davenport Copy Share Image
“The poet and poetess have always had a rough time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people a la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a… — Guy Davenport Copy Share
Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of… — Guy Davenport Copy Share Image
I’ve carved the puppet, and I manipulate the strings, but while it’s on stage, the show belongs to the puppet. — Guy Davenport Copy Share Image
“I God, a very Gomorry on wheels! You lead the most exciting life I know of, and complain more about it than any two well-off bastards in the running. I am glad to hear you sound like your old self, though I never hearn of no Jonathan with two Davids. Top of this letter is an allusion to that wonderful… — Guy Davenport Copy Share
“Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a… — Guy Davenport Copy Share
It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance… — Guy Davenport Copy Share
nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it. — Guy Davenport Copy Share Image
