No need for everyone to learn Provencal but maybe someone should consider the merits of Auden or Gruppe 47?

Guy Davenport, on the other hand, zips back and forth between the ages, then laterally across genres and mediums, teasing out parallels and themes between such strange bedfellows as, for example, Poe, Grant Wood, and the myth of Persephone, sure-handedly leading the reader through a byzantine maze of arcana and out into fuller perspectives.

It seems that a way with the suggestive fragment, the connective anecdote—“let the song lie in the thing! Davenport published over 40 books, among them collections of short stories, translations from the Greek, illustrated works, a novel, and critical studies on literature, culture, and art. Henry Award for short stories, the 1981 Morton Douwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and translation awards from PEN and the Academy of American Poets.

he's at his best talking about ancient greece or modernist poetry; when he can combine the two (like when he's talking about pound) he's absolutely incredible. A pleasure of reading Davenport is his compression of any given matrix of affinities—the whole lit-crit trainspotting of influences on and influences of—into striking little scenes like that of Degas staying up all night with the Zoopraxia.

Faustus is a rich composite, an allegory of the German spirit, but we still have to account for descriptions of imaginary music corresponding so eerily to the Fourth Symphony (Ives').