The Geography Of The Imagination

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE IMAGINATION FORTY ESSAYS BY GUY DAVENPORT North Point Press • San Francisco • 1981 Introduction to The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz. Copyright© 1963 by Beacon Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press. The essay "Jonathan Williams" appeared first as the introduction to An Ear in Bartram's Tree: Selected Poems, 1957-1967 by Jonathan Williams. Copyright© 1969 Jonathan Williams. Reprinted by permission of The University of North Carolina Press. A portion of the essay "Ronald Johnson" was first published as an intro­ duction to Mr. Johnson's Valley ofthe Many-Colored Grasses published in 1969 by W.W. Norton., Inc. Reprinted by permission. Quotations from the works of Ezra Pound are all used by permission of New Direc­ tions Publishing Corporation: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Copyright© 1934, 1937, 1948, 1956, 1959 by Ezra Pound; Copyright© by the Estate of Ezra Pound); ABC of Reading (Copyright© 1934 by Ezra Pound); "Hilda's Book" published in the New Directions edition of H. D.'s End to Torment (Copyright© 1979 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust). All previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound , Copyright© 1981 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. THIRD PRINTING Copyright© 1954, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 197� 1973, 1974, 1975, 197� 197� 1979, 1980,and 1981 by Guy Davenport. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number 80-23870 ISBN: 0-86547-001-4 North Point Press 850 Talbot Avenue Berkeley, California 94706 F O R H U G H K E N NE R Table of Contents Acknowledgments The Geography of the Imagination The Symbol of the Archaic Another Odyssey The House That Jack Built Prehistoric Eyes Whitman Olson Zukofsky Marianne Moore IX 3 16 29 45 61 68 80 1 00 1 14 Spinoza's Tulips Do You Have a Poem Book on E. E. Cummings? Seeing Shelley Plain Persephone's Ezra The Pound Vortex Ezra Pound 1885- 1 972 "Trees" Jonathan Williams Ronald Johnson Poetry's Golden Where Poems Come From Ishmael's Double Louis Agassiz That Faire Field of Enna Charles Ives Ozymandias Christ's Cunning Rimesmith Joyce's Forest of Symbols The Man Without Contemporaries Narrative Tone and Form Tcheli tchew Jack Yeats the Elder Wittgenstein Hob bi try Dictionary No, But I've Read the Book The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onward The Indian and His Image Roiling Ralph Eugene Meatyard Ernst Machs Max Ernst 123 131 135 141 165 169 177 180 190 205 209 215 230 250 272 278 282 286 300 308 319 326 3 31 336 339 343 345 35 3 359 368 3 73 Acknowledgments Most of these essays were called into being by editors and occasions. "The Symbol of the Archaic" was read at the University of Louisville as part of the Conference on Twentieth-Century Literature in 1 974, and later that year at the University of Illinois. "The House that Jack Built" was the inaugural lecture to open the Yale Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries, 30 October 1975. "The Geography of the Imagination" was the Distinguished Professor Lecture at the Univer­ sity of Kentucky for 1978. "Joyce's Forest of Symbols" was the Eberhardt Faber Lecture for 1 973 at Princeton. For permission to reprint I am grateful to Perspective and The Georgia Review for slightly different versions of "The Symbol of the Archaic"; to S