In an essay on Wallace Stevens collected in “The Geography of the Imagination,” the polymath Guy Davenport, who died at the age of 77 on January 4, penned a sentence that inadvertently encapsulates his own inimitable style. “The essential prose,” he wrote, “to be tolerable, and because it leads, with Spinoza, to man’s love for this world, and because, with Santayana, it grows from an ‘animal faith,’ must wear a poem’s guise.” How characteristic of Davenport to insert those sly clauses, which offer a crystallized (and accurate) summation of both Spinoza and Santayana, into this elegant declaration. Note too that little phrase “to be tolerable,” a qualification at once civil and admonitory. Prose that is “essential” should be tolerable as well, though it deck itself in “a poem’s guise.” Davenport’s own prose was always tolerable, but it had many other qualities as well; his prose was dapper and fastidious, austerely whimsical, laced with cunning allusions and echoes, arch and playful and grave all at once. In fact, the only intolerable aspect of Davenport’s prose is that it has now stopped flowing forever.

In essays, short stories, reviews, parables and fables and poems – I count some 28 titles in his oeuvre, but I’m sure that tally is incomplete – Davenport indulged his magisterial affection for the world. His enthusiasm was omnivorous. “The Geography of the Imagination,” to mention but that book, contains distinctive essays on Wittgenstein, Marianne Moore, Louis Agassiz, prehistoric art, “the anthropology of table manners,” and the bizarre American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, among other subjects. Some of his predilections I find uncongenial, especially in poetry; he was fond of Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky, for example, a fondness I consider misplaced. But when he writes about Olson, he seduces me despite my misgivings.

Here is how that essay begins:

It is now almost seven years since the enormous presence of Charles Olson arrived rumpled and wild upon the yellow distances of the Plain of Elysion, on the outermost ring of the circle river Okeanos, estate of heroes and poets, where he would have to bend deeply to embrace his beloved Keats, twenty-one inches shorter than Olson, who in his stocking feet was taller by half again than Alexander the Great.

Who could resist such an opening? And it keeps getting better, salted as it is with the most astonishing snippets of outrageous fact (“Bret Harte’s funeral was followed by a taggle of dogs throwing his entrails into the air [evisceration was a problem for early embalmers, and Harte was the first American author to be embalmed]…”). Davenport’s admiration for Olson was neither naive nor indiscriminate, as this wonderful passage shows:

His poetry is inarticulate. His lectures achieved depths of incoherence. His long poem “Maximus” was left unfinished, like most of his projects and practically all his sentences. He put food in his pockets at dinner parties. He was saved from starving by Hermann Broch. He once ate an oil rag. He was, like Coleridge, a passionate talker for whom whole days and nights were too brief a time to exhaust a subject. He wrote a study of American musical comedies, was a professional dancer, served in the State Department under Roosevelt, went to the rain forests of Yucatan, was rector of a college. He was taller than doors and had the physique of a bear. He was an addict as he grew older to both alcohol and drugs.

His ensuing exegesis of Olson’s poetry, which I’ve always found leaden and incoherent, makes me wonder if maybe I’ve misread that gangling giant. But this doubt doesn’t survive a sodden plunge back into “The Maximus Poems.” Davenport, while you’re reading him, could make you like anyone or anything; the quirky elegance of his enthusiasm, his amazing intelligence and learning, can be overwhelming. And if in the end he was wrong about this or that author or artist, it doesn’t matter; the delight in reading him lies in following the twists and switchbacks of his sidewinder mind over the most improbable Mojaves.

Guy Davenport loved the jolt of juxtaposition and, in fact, the sudden collocation of unexpected facts or entities (which is, by the way, the very essence of the process of metaphor) distinguishes his manner throughout. This, I believe (quite apart from the beauty of his sentences), is what he meant by saying that prose must wear a poem’s guise. Prose need not be linear and consecutive to be “tolerable” but can be, should be, as zany in its leaps and pirouettes as any poem.

Like Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he is comparable in depth and intricacy of imagination, Davenport was celebrated most for his prose but like Borges, he wrote poetry too. His 1991 collection “Flowers and Leaves” (Bamberger Books), originally published by his friend, the equally unclassifiable Jonathan Williams, in 1966, shows just how fine a poet Davenport could be. This long poem is dedicated to Charles Ives, another unpredictable genius, and displays Davenport’s indebtedness to such Modernists as Ezra Pound, while at the same time wholly manifesting his own idiosyncratic vision; there are references to everyone from Sister Rosetta Tharp to the Chinese classics, lines and whole stanzas in French or Latin or Greek, those odd or archaic words Davenport took such pleasure in, such as “fissus” or “aeromorph.” But what saves the poem from mere arcane eccentricity is Davenport’s strong lyric impulse and his allied sense of the freshness of the American earth:

And, tilted on a hair warped in curves, clashes
His husks of shins, as tall grass lashes tall grass
In a crisp September. And up out of mist,
On a smoky day, the grasshopper whirrs, where the black
Sticks of the altar fire cast a thin and hazel air,
And widows turn in twisted black from the temple steps.

The poem, as befits a panegyric for Ives, is redolent with the scent of “the wild sea wheat along the harbour shore” and “gentians and peaches laced with lavender.” Davenport was a virtuoso of allusion, drawing on the ancient Greeks and the Russian Constructivists with equal aplomb, but it is his passionate engagement with the earth that carries his poem.

Probably the best introduction to this irreplaceable artist is “The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 379 pages, $26), which gives an ample selection from his essays and tales (though not his poetry). The obituary photos of Guy Davenport showed us a face at once boyish and grave; it was the face of an Ariel shadowed by Caliban. The thick lifted eyebrows, the large eyes with their clear and bemused gaze, the youthful, almost elfin, shape of the chin, suggest a temperament poised between irony and astonishment. Perhaps though it is mischief rather than mastery that shines out of his eyes; certainly a sublime mischievousness kept – and will keep – his work young.