A map of intellectual correspondences: forty pieces moving between literature, painting, archaeology, philosophy, anthropology, myth and the history of perception.

Davenport writes on Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wittgenstein, Whitman, Joyce, Charles Olson, Tolkien, prehistoric art and Greek culture, but his real subject is the traffic between them — the way images, forms and ideas survive by migrating across centuries.

His method is associative, a prehistoric engraving can lead to modern cartooning; a line of poetry opens onto mythology, music or the structure of language. Davenport treats culture as something closer to an ecosystem, to fuel his interest exploring where imagination happens, what intellectual terrain makes a work possible, and how apparently distant objects become neighbours once you learn to see their underlying structures. Dense, eccentric, extraordinarily learned, but also playful — scholarship conducted with the instincts of a collector rather than a bureaucrat. The collection ranges widely across Greek culture, modernist literature, philosophy and visual culture. 

Picador / Pan Books, London, 1984. First British edition, first printing, with complete 9–1 number line. Paperback. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press), Bungay, Suffolk. Light rubbing and shelf wear to covers and edges; mild creasing and toning consistent with age. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.