Customer Reviews

Selected Letters

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A pure pleasure. If you admire Davenport's work you'll enjoy this. The editor says that it was Laughlin's wishes that his side of the correspondence in this series be kept to a minimum, but there's still enough to interest a fan of Laughlin's work as well. And give Norton, the publisher, credit for not balking at including Davenport's characterization of those who supply the "idiotic footnotes" for Norton poetry anthologies as "entertainingly illiterate." I'm comparatively illiterate myself, in the standard set by these two writers. But--surely the "Passage to India" Davenport refers to on page 115 is not the Forster novel footnoted, but Whitman's poem? But you won't read this for the footnotes anyway.
Not a lot of literary gossip--you may sometimes wonder what the editorial elipses after, say, Gary Snyder is mentioned might be keeping from you.

In the early 1980s I took one class with Guy Davenport and that experience still influences my interests and tastes. Ideas from that classroom echo through this book, which presents spirited, humorous, and insanely erudite correspondence (via typed letters!) between two intellectual companions. Prepare to be inspired.