Henry Award, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. McLuhan famously argued that electronic media was creating a global village in which books would become obsolete. 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.

I came to the book for Davenport's essay on his neighbor, the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (both men worked and flourished in the same "rotting Kentucky town", Lexington), but all 40 of these essays (written in the 1970's) are well worth devouring. An exquisite, lovingly crafted meditation on plants, trees, and our place in the natural world, in the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek . Davenport provides links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present. It wasn’t until I reached the very last essay that I stopped wondering why he seemed to be holding back.

Even Davenport concedes: "I am not able here to give any notion of the wideness of these last Maximus poems-the horizon they survey is vast-nor of their depth, which goes back into various histories (the Hittite, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, paleolithic) in new and bright ways (Olson's eyes were open to everything and very little got by him). Nothing characterizes the twentieth century more than its inability to pay attention to anything for more than a week. The great modernist archaic, our Montaigne by way of Emerson, whose thoughts elide easily such disparates as Ancient Greece and the Old Testament and Kafka's Prague or Joyce's nightworld, to show us there are no disparities, no true separation, that the human culture which creates the great works of Art is the flame which needs to be kindled, to be carried in a horn through the night as embers for generation unto generation, who makes in these essays a prose-place like eddies out of the River of Time, where the first thought and the last thought commingle and speak with each other and their voices attend to every force that has evolved a form, and every noble creative impulse is resolved into a concept, a graspable infinite, a gift for humanity. He's especially enamored of homegrown and largely self-educated American oddballs (the above three standing out as remarkable examples, along with Pound, Whitman, Melville, etc. Their common subject, motion, the robust real, skilled and purposeful action, was distinctly American, an invention.

The early interpreters of The Cantos tended to see the poem as a study of the man of willed and directed action, as a persona of Odysseus. Robert Frost, teaching a class at America’s most prestigious and snootiest university, is surrounded by sycophantic “Harvardlings. Extremely important in terms of statement of Davenport's aesthetics, a very personal essay, should be read in tandem with Barth's The Self in Fiction. 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.Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality.