In this collection, Guy Davenport serves as the reader's guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. Davenport provides links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present. And pretty much everything in between. Not only has he seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also has the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to make the connections, to see how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization.

As The Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote, "There is no way to prepare yourself for reading Guy Davenport. You stand in awe before his knowledge of the archaic and his knowledge of the modern. Even more, you stand in awe of the connections he can make between the archaic and the modern; he makes the remote familiar and the familiar fundamental."