The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical… — 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,… — Guy Davenport Copy Share Image
nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it. — Guy Davenport Copy Share Image
