By Dan
Adkins
The medallion is awarded
annually to recognize outstanding intellectual achievements by individuals who have worked
in Kentucky or are native Kentuckians.
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April
19, 2000 – (Lexington, Ky.) – Author,
poet, critic and artist Guy Davenport has received the University of Kentucky Libraries
2001 Medallion for Intellectual Achievement recognizing his broad contributions to
American and world literature. The
medallion is awarded annually to recognize outstanding intellectual achievements by
individuals who have worked in Kentucky or are native Kentuckians. The medallion
encourages education and the free and creative use of the mind by citizens of Kentucky.
A native of Anderson, S.C., Davenport did his undergraduate work at Duke University.
Awarded a Rhodes scholarship, he went to Merton College, Oxford, Great Britain, where he
wrote on Joyce’s “Ulysses” before completing his doctoral work at Harvard
with a dissertation on Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.”
He joined the University of Kentucky faculty in 1963. That same year he published a
book on Harvard natural philosopher Louis Agassiz, followed by several volumes of poetry,
translations of works from classical Greek authors and essays on modernist poets. In 1974,
Scribner’s published his first collection of short stories entitled “Tatlin!”
A second collection of short stories, “DaVinci’s Bicycle,” was published in
1979.
“Ecologues”
appeared in 1981 as well as a collection of 40 essays, “Geography of the Imagination.”
Other publications include: “Thasos and Ohio,” a volume of poems, in 1986;
“The Jules Verne Steam Balloon” short story collection in 1987; “A Table of
Green Fields“ in 1993; “The Cardiff Team” in 1996 and “A
Balance of Quinces,” an edition of his paintings and drawings. In 1997 he published
“The Hunter Gracchus,” a collection of essays on literature and art; and in
1998, “Objects on a Table,” an aesthetic meditation on the representation of
objects in literature and still-life painting.
Along
with his published works, Davenport has received numerous awards including the O. Henry
Award for short stories, the 1981 Morton Douwen Zabel award for fiction from the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, translation awards from PEN and the Academy of
American Poets, the Leviton-Blumenthal Prize for poetry and the 1990 MacArthur Fellowship.
Davenport
retired in 1990 as a UK Distinguished Alumni Professor of English.
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