Forty essays on history, art, and literature to lift your mind and spirit. Guy Davenport serves as the listener's guide through history and literature, providing links between music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present—pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking.

Davenport seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything ever written and had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. In these essays we find fresh thinking on Greek culture, Whitman, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Melville, Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, Eudora Welty, Louis Zukovsky, and many others. Each essay is a tour of the history of ideas and imagination, written with wit and startling erudition.

This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan.