Creative partners …

… The Unlikely Friendship that Unlocked Two Writers’ Talents | The New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Left to his own devices, Davenport could have made do as a scholarly hermit, content to read books, fill up his notebooks, teach a few students, and go camping with his lovers. Yet Davenport avoided this fate and became a prolific essayist, illustrator, translator, poet, fiction writer. He owed this transformation largely to one man, the literary critic Hugh Kenner. The intense friendship between the two writers, a consequential union that remade them both, can now be charted, thanks to the publication of a hefty and sturdy two-volume set, Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward M. Burns. The volumes make clear that it was Kenner who coaxed Davenport into print, while Davenport was the source of many of the key ideas, and even some of the words, of Kenner’s 1971 masterpiece, The Pound Era, one of the greatest works of literary criticism of the last century.