Donald Davie

Donald Davie (1922-1995). Courtesy eNotes.

Donald Alfred Davie (17 July 1922 - 18 September 1995) was an English poet and literary critic affiliated with The Movement. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.

Life

Davie was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England, a son of Baptist parents. He began his education at Barnsley Hogate Grammar school, and later attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge. His studies there were interrupted by service during the war in the Royal Navy in Arctic Russia, where he taught himself the language. In the last year of the war, in Devon, he married Doreen John. After returning to Cambridge in 1958, he continued his studies and received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D.

In 1964 he was appointed the inaugural Professor of English at the new University of Essex (UE). He taught English at the UE from 1964 until 1968, when he moved to Stanford University, where he succeeded Yvor Winters. In 1978, he relocated to Vanderbilt University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988.

Writing

Davie often wrote on the technique of poetry, both in books such as Purity of Diction in English Verse, and in smaller articles such as 'Some Notes on Rhythm in Verse'. Davie's criticism and poetry are both characterized by his interest in modernist and pre-modernist techniques. Davie claimed "there is no necessary connection between the poetic vocation on the one hand, and on the other exhibitionism, egoism, and licence". He writes eloquently and sympathetically about British modernist poetry in Under Briggflatts, while in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry he defends a pre-modernist verse tradition.

Much of Davie's poetry has been compared to that of formalist Philip Larkin, but other works are more influenced by Ezra Pound.

Recognition

Davies' poetry is anthologized in the Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse (1980).

Publications

Poetry

• Fantasy Poets, no. 19. Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1954.
• A Winter Talent, and other poems. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.
• New and Selected Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
• Events and Wisdoms: Poems, 1957-1963. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964; Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965).
• Essex Poems: 1963-1967. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.
• Poems. London: Turret Books, 1969.
• Collected Poems, 1950-1970. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972; New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
• In the Stopping Train, and other poems. Manchester, UK: Carcanet New Press, 1977; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
• Three for Water-Music and the Shires. Manchester, UK: Carcanet New Press, 1981.
• Collected Poems, 1970-1983. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 1983; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
• Selected Poems. Manchester< UK: Carcanet Press, 1985.
• To Scorch or Freeze: Poems about the sacred. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1988.
• Collected Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
• Poems and Melodramas. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1996.
• Penguin Modern Poets 7 (by Donald Davie, Samuel Menashe, & Allen Curnow). London & New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Non-fiction

• Purity of Diction in English Verse. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952; New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
  • 2nd edition (with “A Postscript, 1966”) London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967; New York: Schocken, 1967.
• Brides of Reason. Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1955.
• Articulate Energy: An Enquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958.
• The Forests of Lithuania. Hessle, Yorkshire: Marvell Press, 1959.
• The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961.
• The Poetry of Sir Walter Scott. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
• A Sequence for Francis Parkman. Hessle, Yorkshire: Marvell Press, 1961.
• The Language of Science and the Language of Literature, 1700-1740. London & New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963.
• Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.
• Six Epistles to Eva Hesse. London: London Magazine Editions, 1970.
• Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
• The Shires. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
• Pound. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1975.
  • republished as Ezra Pound. New York: Viking, 1976.
• The Poet in the Imaginary Museum: Essays of Two Decades (edited by Barry Alpert). Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1977; New York: Persea Books, 1977.
• A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930, The Clark Lectures 1976. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Trying to Explain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979.
  • Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 1986
• Kenneth Allott and the Thirties. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1980.
• English Hymnology in the Eighteenth Century: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, 5 March 1977 (by Davie and Robert Stevenson). Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1980.
• Dissentient Voice. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.
• These the Companions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
• Czeslaw Milosz, and the Insufficiency of Lyric. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
• Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain, 1960-1988. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989; Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 1989.
• Slavic Excursions: Essays on Russian and Polish Literature. Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 1990; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
• Studies in Ezra Pound. Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 1991.
• Older Masters: Essays and Reflections on English and American Literature. London: Carcanet, 1992.
• Ghosts in the Corridor (by Davie, Andrew Crozier, and C.H. Sisson). London: Paladin, 1992.
• The Eighteenth-Century Hymn in England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Essays in Dissent: Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1995.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

Devin Jones "Across the Bay" by Donald Davie, Utah Poetry Out Loud State Final 2013

• Donald Davie Reading at Stanford. The Stanford Program for Recording in Sound (CFS 3647), 1974.

See also

• Movement poets
• List of British poets

External links

Poems

• "Across the Bay"
• Donald Davie 1922-1995 at the Poetry Foundation

Books

• Donald Davie at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Donald Davie in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

About

• "Donald Davie, 73, poet and litrary critic, dies," New York Times obituary
• Obituary: Professor Donald Davie" at The Independent