[5] At Duke, he studied art[4] (with Clare Leighton), graduating with a BA summa cum laude in classics and English literature.

In 1950, upon his return to the United States, Davenport was drafted into the US Army for two years, spending them at Fort Bragg in the 756th Field Artillery, then in the XVIII Airborne Corps.

After the army, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis until 1955, when he began earning a PhD at Harvard,[6] studying under Harry Levin and Archibald MacLeish.

They carried on a voluminous correspondence from 1958 till 2002, as recorded in the book Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner.

[7][8][9] After completing his PhD, he taught at Haverford College from 1961 to 1963 but soon took a position at the University of Kentucky, "the remotest offer with the most pay," as he wrote to Jonathan Williams.

[17] His books include Tatlin!, Da Vinci's Bicycle, Eclogues, Apples and Pears, The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers, A Table of Green Fields, The Cardiff Team, and Wo es war, soll ich werden.

The longest are the book-length Flowers and Leaves, an intricate meditation on art and America, and "The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard" (borrowing the title from a painting by Stanley Spencer).

He also translated the occasional other piece, including a few poems of Rilke's, some ancient Egyptian texts [after Boris de Rachewiltz], and, with Benjamin Urrutia, the sayings of Jesus, published as The Logia of Yeshua.

The former remained dormant or sporadic for some time while the latter, "making drawings, watercolors, and gouaches, [continued] throughout school, the army, and his early years as a teacher.

"[18] He drew or painted nearly every day of his life,[18] and his notebooks contain drawings and pasted-in illustrations and photos cheek by jowl with his own observations and other writings and quotations from others.

The designer [of A+P] understood [my] collages to be gratuitous illustrations having nothing to do with anything, reduced them all to burnt toast, framed them with nonsensical lines, and sabotaged my whole enterprise.