20th-century renissance …

… Reflections on Guy Davenport’s Poetics – Marjorie Perloff. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… vintage Davenport: the mix of remarkable precision — names and dates—with large-scale generalization, of historic pinpointing with evaluative conclusion. A similar point is made in “The Pound Vortex” (1972), where Davenport declares: “What we call the twentieth century ended in 1915. Those artists who survived the collapse of civilization at that point completed the work they had planned before then, when the looked forward to a century of completely different character” (GI 166). And again the roll call of names includes Pound and Joyce, this time along with those killed in or because of the war: the Polish-French sculptor Henri Gaudier Brzeska, the Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia, the French poet Apollinaire and novelist Alain-Fournier.

Actually, Henri Gaudier was entirely French. The Polish Sophie Brzeska was his companion and muse.