REVIEWING DONALD DAVIE'S FEELINGFUL LIFE

That oooold Augustan rag

A man who ought to know me
wrote in a review
my emotional life was meagre.

(Donald Davie, “July 1964”)

1.

According to Basil Bunting, and Donald Davie said he and F.W. Bateson condoned it, William Wordsworth was "mostly misrepresented as part of the Romantic movement... really the culmination of the 18th century. All the things they were feeling for and trying for throughout that century he suddenly brings to perfection. You have in him, beside the realism, the acme of the discursive poem that the 18th century was always busy with".

Bunting's greatest skill as a critic is useful here, the weighting of words. Here the scales test and assess the word "feeling", just by body language. He illuminates the much condoned Wordsworth dictum that poetry writing is "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings". Here Davie could take comfort and vigour from Bunting as critic. For not emotiveness but feel is what Davie had.

Bunting admired Wordsworth as a great narrative poet ("the best we have in English"). He meant an opinionated narrative poet – Wordsworth was one, and so was Bunting. The Wordsworthian opinionated poet channels the flow of 18th century discursive poets, but with parables.

Wordsworth's opinionation functions through apparent spontaneity and/of life, a light touch; not carte blanche for incontinent unreciprocative emotiveness. Emotiveness, the colloquial, even narrative can travesty the mentor poets it says it admires. What learns surface and superficial form but gets no grease on its hands from a stripped engine needs a good mechanic. Or it gets ridden to death: just as metaphors can become dead metaphors. Davie's wonderful word for what we should do with dead metaphors and habits is “revivify". It gets the poem roadworthy.

What Donald Davie was doing on the road was not, as such, narrative. He had little skill with plot-reveal; and not much with the QED. He tended to a picturesqueness-peppered politician's phrase-making; with a reliable sounding properness, some flavoursome hint of character.

Properness is not seriousness. Sinead Morrissey in her introduction to her new Selected Poems Of Donald Davie feels that the key to Davie is to recognise him as very serious and then not let that intimidate us. She says with some archness: “He took poetry deadly seriously, in a way it is almost impossible to take it today, describing it, without blinking, as vital ‘for the survival of our civilisation’…. Davie may well have been right, but as we lurch from one global disaster to the next… such claims for Poetry – Poetry! – not to mention the self-importance with which they are stated, appear increasingly difficult to credit” (repeating a key term – poetry… poetry! –in dashes with an apostrophe I'll show is a Davieism here; even ‘to credit” a possible homage to the ending of his “Or, Solitude”).

“Without blinking” isn't an acme of seriousness without risk, though. The unblinking can be bluffers. Bluffers can come from different bases: from the saloon bar bore, to the Cambridge Don, to the pseudo-Socratic. A deeper basis is revealed by the larger bodily expression. A Davie contemporary, Bernard Bergonzi, contextualised him thus: “Davie reveres Pound for taking the art of poetry with true seriousness, as opposed to English amateurism”. Note Bergonzi’s carefully weighted and quite passionate pivot on “reveres”. The poet who needs to revere takes exemplars to back hunches. The poet who needs to reverse jumps to new high quick conclusions. In both cases, the recruited exemplar can be pushed away just as other people climb after.

As to what raises stakes, and what standards, and how much either stem from boredom with the (perhaps personally well-heeled) status quo, Anthony Thwaite once related to me the firm jibe he confronted Davie with: “Donald… you're a shit-stirrer”. Thwaite said Davie’s eye didn’t blink, There was a glint and a grin. After all, in Who's Who, Davie put “literary politics” as one of his three pastimes.

Davie was an adult troublemaker, where Bunting was teenagey. Bunting’s rebel sixties gang of unwashed teenagey poets didn't need him to do their work, and some of it was good work. Davie did not mean the thug-Buntingonians in his poem “To Certain English Poets”. Listen to it here, first in the setlist, from an invaluably recorded reading made at Stanford in 1975. Listen before reading it.

https://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/Stanford/index.html

Davie’s “certain English poets” here were at least some Carcanet crafters, and the Prynnites (some rubbing alongside the thugs, in the Children of Albion anthology). Davie’s clucking tone was not unlike Auden’s asking gathered friends call him “Mother”. The crafter poets largely found Davie occasionally diverting, but mostly too Enthusiast. The Prynnites were wary. Steve Clark, in an essay about Prynne’s ‘Movement beginnings’, simply by quoting Davie's poems alongside especially Prynne’s discarded early work, begrudgingly shows that Davie hatched Prynne more than any Movement poet. Yet Clark is always sure to tell us Davie’s poems shouldn't be liked. He reliably carps about “To Certain English Poets”: “The grating opening is already demode…  (why the Audenesque campness of ‘dears’?), and there is something self-commending even in the closing plea for truculence: ‘Or will you, contained, still burn with that surly pluck?’ ”. 

http://jacketmagazine.com/24/clark-s.html

“To Certain English Poets” shows Davie having public fun and being bracing, putting his body where his innuendo is. Davie disliked puns on etymology in poetry when they affect the bodying forth (1). His true cause was that a poet should only play with the appearance of a noun to suggest another noun, or with a verb to suggest another verb, within a solid syntax – only allowing sleighting in the linebreaks. We shan't find many linebreak sleights in the visual form of “To Certain English Poets”, an unusual different thing, given the aural shape it has when Davie recites it:

TO CERTAIN ENGLISH POETS

My dears, don't I know? I esteem you more than you think, 

     you modest and quietly spoken, you stubborn and unpersuaded. 

     Your civil dislikes hum over a base that others

     shudder at, as at some infernal cold.

But pits full of smoky flame are sunk in the English Gehenna, 

     where suffering souls like ours are bound and planted 

     now in the one hot spot, now in another.

The operator is an imagination of Dante

     that plucks us out of the one and plugs us at once in another 

     with an obedient pip-pip-pip at the switchboard.

Like I look with astonished fear and revulsion you

      at the gross and bearded, articulate and good-humoured 

      Franco-American torso, pinned across

      the plane of human action, twitching and roaring. 

Yet a restlessness less than divine comes over us, doesn't it, sometimes,

      to string our whole frames, ours also, in scintillant items, 

     with an unabashed crackle of intercom and static?

Or will you, contained, still burn with that surly pluck?

This is not in the Morrissey selection although it appears in the 1996 Penguin Modern Poets selection where Davie is alongside Menashe and Curnow, and also in the exemplary 1992 Ghosts in the Corridor selection where Davie is alongside Crozier and Sisson. Like many poems in Davie's oeuvre, but unlike almost all the poems in the Morrissey selection, it doesn't pretend to be said by a raconteur or a broken man. Its delicate metre changes, and bass notes are wonderfully there to the ear more than to the eye. It is Buntingesque.

There is no question that Davie did heavily create a bluffing poetics (different from poetic persona), to gather his and other people's poems together in its name. Yet he was nearer to a true ambitious poetics himself than Bunting – although he was misguided enough to pronounce it in the Northumberland self-professed “technician”. Where Davie seems to have been mostly unsparing with friends, Bunting was a crackling haphazard conversationalist: an aperçu, once arrived at, there to trot out, weighted by motor memory.

Poet Basil gets more plaudits than poet-critic Donald. This could of course be the result of Davie being better at critical work than actually writing poems – something many have proposed. Or it could hide something shameful: that Davie's poems come off the page for only a pure few. Davie's is not outsider art, but unfashionable art: like Bunting himself pre-Briggflatts. Davie needs readers bored of the things so many are doing, not least the poetry of ill-conceptualised overflow. His refreshing antidote does not become canonical. It's not in an anthology or full text on the reading list for the university where the editor of his Selected teaches (from the look online) for all a University English Department should study the science of the whole habitat.

Studious T. S. Eliot, for example, surveyed 18th century poetry. I wonder if he would concur with Davie’s music hall one-liner in one of his poems: that at least when young he was a “pasticheur of late Augustan styles”. Morrissey gives us that “the first poetic form Davie consistently adopted, taking his cue directly from the eighteenth century, was the rhyming, heavily metred quatrain… which pivoted, not on feeling, but decorum”. But is this Augustan? We shall return to the question momentarily.

Morrissey quotes, in her introduction’s section on the two “foundational works of criticism, Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy”, Davie himself:

“If Articulate Energy reads quaintly now, it may be because of its author's ingenuous assumption that Wordsworth and Pope – Pope! – were not just standard authors reeking of the library and the examination-hall, but living presences in our poetry, challenging emulation and guiding practice”

Morrissey doesn't leap to his defence here. She goes with his modesty. As Davie downplays how “foundational” his action was, Morrissey plays lip service to something good in it, but gives little confidence she has ever taken it on board (the poet’s response). In how these two books are formative, she is incomplete and gnomic, possibly ignorant of (see below) Eliot’s, earlier, very similar analysis of the uses of Augustanism, and unreliable on what is and is not “foundational”. Indeed the word is more for a play of tones than informative in her hands. It mainly does implying: of stuffy properness: an upbringing to be overcome, an acquired Cambridge University bookishness; and she pats him on the back for times he exceeded it. But one can escape without ever exceeding. She is curiously uncurious about words in the way that they complicate tone, how they defy surface ambiguity, how they refuse pun. The woundable “pasticheur” can be ready to get angry if anyone should concur with his self-critique – his word as chip on the shoulder.

For example, “ingenuous”, the adjective from ingenue, is a key here, a Davie trapdoor. Look where the word “ingenuous” also appears in his poem “Mr Sharp in Florence”:

Americans are innocents abroad;

But Sharp from Sheffield is the cagey kind

And out of the knifebox bleeding — can’t afford

To bring to Florence such an open mind.

Poor Mr Sharp! And happy transatlantic

Travellers, so ingenuous! But some

Are so alert they can finesse the trick,

So strong they know when to be overcome.

Here “ingenuous” shows maidenly innocence, and makes it intrinsically American. It queers Davie's use of “transatlantic” alongside it, although this is held off wilfully to maintain a rhythm, a bluff, a hurt. For what is the innocence: a function of crossing the Atlantic in both directions; a being in-between; or a resistant prudery? Davie moves backwards and forwards throughout his career on the idea of American English as innocent, and British English as disingenuous. In the same lifetime he identifies, not quite locates, a haunted innocence in himself.

“Ingenuous” both is and isn’t “indigenous” (they share etymology) to one nation. It is haunted, because aware of trying to be shy. It’s shy of sin – and this is part of what Morrissey calls a “self-importance… difficult to credit”. Self-importance in Christian poets ought to come off a good shriving, but afterwards whip the good news out from the bushel. Steve Clark finds in Davie “something self-commending”, but thereby misses the commitment to contrition, and the confidence among peers thereafter. Such is there throughout English poetry, up to and including Whitman, and certainly in Milton:

      Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well managed

Pronounce that merely distasteful style, you cut loose from, and neuter, riches.

One could argue the noun-work over “ingenuous” in “Mr Sharp in Florence” and allege that Davie’s prose is late Augustan, without calling the whole early poetic Augustan. Certainly there are heavy end-rhymes, and certainly didacticism, both of which, in a simple culinary sense, taste Augustan. But, train the palette: is this really like Samuel Johnson, Cowley, and the rest? Compared to the very earliest poems in Morrissey's Selected, certainly a condensing force comes, and couldn't come too soon – so that when at last some standard is set, real things emerge. But surely the 1950s poems are mostly based on metaphysical (Donneish) conceits: “Mr Sharp in Florence” or “Poem as Abstract” (the latter selected by Morrissey and almost never left out by any selector). They may have catchphrases like Pope, but not Pope's embedding argumentation. They do not work with the garrulousness of the Augustans that inspired Byron. Perhaps the most late Augustan Davie poetry is in his comedy strand, in couplets, reaching apotheosis in the 1970 Six Epistles for Eva Hesse:

Besides, we've reached rock-bottom now;

Byronic skiff and Crabbe-like scow

And Landor's lovely craft alike,

Forced upon the shoreline, strike.

They fill before they feel the shock,

In such small print it is; the rock

Of the obituaries, on whose

Shallow ubiquity the Muse

Time and again has struck and foundered.

This is like many Augustans, and different from most Davie. It is the exception in him, not the rule.

Let us look closely, by contrast, at “Poem as Abstract”. First, consider the truncated epigraph, which originally revelled in its context of first publication (the 1952 New Statesman and Nation) usefully: “To write about a tree…first be a tree… from an article by W. R. Rodgers in these pages”. Rodgers was a Belfast poet, whom I feel is possibly being wholesale mocked here, as if with a gotcha to discredit him. Here is the whole first section of Davie’s poem-response to Rodgers.

A poem is less an orange than a grid;

It hoists a charge; it does not ooze a juice.

It has no rind, being entirely hard.

All drumming yards and open, it asserts

That clouds have way upon them, and that hills

Breast into time behind a singing strut.

A sheer abstraction, apt upon the grass

Of London parks, has emulated oak

And aped the ramage that it could surpass.

That construct, ribbed with wire across a quern,

Is caging such serenity of stress

As boughs, or fruit that breaks them, cannot learn.

For gods are gathered from the styles they wear,

And do they curl, a foetus in a fruit,

Or, like Orion, pinned upon the air?

It's very possible to stop at the first line, a great catchphrase, and many seem to. This would be to miss that the catchphrase is not bedded down, is not exemplified. In fact, the theme of an orange comes back only glancingly, in the second part of the poem, and the grid theme only when Davie semi-quotes his opening line as a refrain. Something awkward is being done, and not in an Augustan way.

First of all the poem seems to depict something hard to visualise: an abstract sculpture of a tree on a round base in a London park. It may well be of a pretend tree with bare branches. I can't find a specific sculpture that Davie could have seen in London in 1952, so let's as a placeholder consider a Henry Moore abstract statue in Dublin (below).

This statue has a round base, which could conceivably appear as the “quern” mentioned in the poem – the large rough stone disc that (with a twin) grinds corn in a mill. We could, I think, speculate this statue into one in the Moore mode that could look nearly but not quite an oak. We could imagine a hint of leaf, some sparse wintry ramage.

If we do this, a melancholy poem emerges, of “winter talent”, furthering the conceit of this first major book. The material of the statue Davie saw may not have been stone but something less durable with a wire frame; and there is an implication that Davie himself is on a wiry frame of concerns (and not a very juicy poet). In the second section, not shown here, he speaks of how oranges emerge from a “pip of pain”, one of several hints throughout his work of melancholy wounds. In theory, what is being imagined here is a gridded thing that might grow an orange, therefore an orange tree resembling an oak.

This is a thwarted, unrealised idea. How suitable, for a poem wholly about veto, to have a thwarting theme. Dylan Thomas may have fancied finding an orange tree in a London park but Movement poetics would guilt-trip those Thomasian habits; and less graciously than Samuel Johnson moving his generation on from Milton and even Dryden. Veto is figured as the necessary, the cursèd spite.

Davie does tribute to his own catchphrase where an Augustan would have argued it (2). Tunefully moving through sentences with trepidatious cheek and duty, he pulls off a crucial feat: he makes us remember whole phrases, so some of his readers then return. But sometimes he bamboozles, the flawed detective working the case. Is this a chip on the shoulder, or honesty? And is it Augustan? Take two examples of poems he examines in PoDiEV. Which one feels more like Davie?

1. His wisdom such, at once it did appear

Three Kingdoms' wonder, and three Kingdoms' fear,

While single he stood forth, and seem'd, although

Each had an army, as an equal foe.

Such was his force of eloquence, to make

The hearers more concern'd than he that spake;

Each seem'd to act that part he came to see,

And none was more a looker-on than he;

So did he move our passions, some were known

To wish, for the defence, the crime their own.

Now private pity strove with publick hate,

Reason with rage, and eloquence with fate.

2. Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that

Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat,

Ere its outward form had known decay,

Now felt this change, I cannot say.

Whether that Lady's gentle mind,

No longer with the form combined

Which scattered love, as stars do light,

Found sadness, where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life

Of error, ignorance, and strife,

Where nothing is, but all things seem,

And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet

Pleasant if one considers it.

To own that death itself must be,

Like all the rest, a mockery.

To me, for flow, it is the second example that sounds like Davie. Not Samuel Johnson, but early Shelley. The Johnson tone is there, sure, in some of Davie's couplet poems and is worked on throughout his career. But Davie is generally much more Shelley than quasi-scientific like Johnson.

Thus Davie’s poetics have an aggressively mischievous undertow. We see the avoidance of Romantic pitfalls; but some Romantics cared about these pitfalls too. In PoDiEV, Davie has a whole chapter on Shelley, admiring Shelley for backbone in word choice (and overall word choice) rather than worthy afflatus.

One undertow might be useful lack of (self-)knowledge; the motivation Davie does not conceptualise but feel; as Bunting might have said. Feel to the fore, without dashing aesthetics, is what the sculptors have, and Davie spoke of sculptors all his life. Apprenticeship bubbles to sensuality. Contrary and subtle aspects sneak through.

What is serious here is unsexy aestheticism. Morrissey says that Davie was both “old-fashioned” and one who “lamented”. That's patronising if she doesn't say the same of the more obviously aesthetic Eliot praising Donne, Wordsworth praising Milton, and especially the enthusiastic rewritings of the canon made by Ezra Pound.

What do I mean by “unsexy”? Where Pound put phalloi in the transepts, Davie's archaeology doesn't have Pound or Bunting's lechery (or Prynne's or Eliot’s, signing off a letter to Pound “good fucking, brother”). And this is more than the Christianity that gets a certain play in Morrissey's Selected. Morrisseys Christian Davie has is found a safe space, after the world has been “too much with us”. His reward came for keeping pure. What a sentimental framing.

“Unsexy” nevertheless. Davie says himself in his memoir These The Companions that he idealised Ireland (which gets a subsection to itself in A Winter Talent, along with England and Italy) because of palatability at the time. It was for him the least sexualised country:

“I touch on here what I have constantly experienced as the widest and least passable gulf between myself and those English-speaking contemporaries with whom on other matters I feel most in common. I am, and always have been – let's face it – a prude.”

The ingenue (not a word with a positive connotation these days), the fresh-faced person waiting for marriage or career, defiant and a little embattled, salt of an earth that is not salty, is stung with dignity. In this, he is a true ideological outrider in literary politics: a politics he helps us see as a Freudian whole.

2.

Thoroughness that isn't a smug buffet but self-blinkered is the hallmark of Davie, and he takes this from T. S. Eliot. Take Eliot's lecture on Samuel Johnson, Johnson as Critic and Poet (1944):

“An obvious obstacle to our enjoyment in reading The Lives of the Poets as a whole - and we must read it as a whole if we are to appreciate the magnitude of Johnson's achievement - is that we have not read the works of many of the poets included, and no inducement of pleasure or profit can be offered us to do so…. If we censure an eighteenth-century critic for not having a modern, historical and comprehensive appreciation, we must ourselves adopt towards him the attitude the lack of which we reprehend; we must not be narrow in accusing him of narrowness, or prejudiced in accusing him of prejudice.”

Here is Eliot's historical analysis of how to transplant some clippings:

“To the poet and critic of the eighteenth century, the values of language and literature were more closely allied than they seem to the writers and to the reading public of to-day. Eccentricity or uncouthness was reprehensible: a poet was prized, not for his invention of an original form of speech, but by his contribution to a common language. It was observed by Johnson and by men of his time, that there had been progress in refinement and precision of language, as of refinement and decorum of manners; and both these attainments, being recent, were highly esteemed. Johnson is able to censure Dryden, for his bad manners and bad taste in controversy….

Eliot then goes further:

I come next to Johnson's use of the term poetic diction. To most people nowadays, I imagine, 'poetic diction' means an idiom and a choice of words which are out of date, and which perhaps were never very good at their best. If we are temperate, we mean the use of idiom and vocabulary borrowed from poets of a different generation, idiom and vocabulary no longer suitable for poetry. If we are extreme, we mean that this idiom and vocabulary were always bad, even when they were fresh. Wordsworth, in his Preface, says: 'there will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction.' Johnson uses the term in a eulogistic sense. In the Life of Dryden he remarks: 'There was, therefore, before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriate to particular arts. Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. From those sounds which we hear on small or on coarse occasions, we do not easily receive strong impressions, or delightful images; and words to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they occur, draw that attention to themselves which they should transmit to things.”

To anybody who has read Davie's first critical book closely, these pre-foundational words from Eliot comprise its argument, if not Davie’s pleasure in late Augustan poetry. This Eliot lecture, eight years before Davie's first critical book, when Davie was stationed in Murmansk, is a very useful one for understanding how foundational Davie's historical study of diction is. Davie himself defines diction as a sort of contract with the reader where we can become accustomed to the poem's, as it were, verbal prudishness (he didn't mean expletives). Davie says:

“One feels that Hopkins could have found a place for every word in the language if only he could have written enough poems. One feels the same about Shakespeare. But there are poets, I find, with whom I feel the other thing - that a selection has been made and is continually being made, that words are thrusting at the poem and being fended off from it, that however many poems these poets wrote certain words would never be allowed into the poems, except as a disastrous oversight.”

Fending off the thrusters, Davie presents his study of a historical period of agreed habits of diction, while making the other post-Lapsarian case that the best we can do now is sail between faux-naivety and dictionary vomit. This is hard to get right: hence the (tragic) pasticheur. 

This pasticheur needs now nevertheless always the underlying action of collage. And here Pound comes in. Eliot is quoted many times in PoDiEV, for his prose criticism and for his poetry. Ezra Pound is quoted only for an ornery interjection. Davie quotes Pound saying: “Abrupt and disordered syntax can at times be very honest, and an elaborately constructed sentence can be at times merely an elaborate camouflage”.

If we balance the one influence from Pound with the other from Eliot, and add their anti-Amygist committed Gautieresque tight form, we get Davie. He the tight rhymer can harness a disorder, within elaborately constructed sentences. Honest and abrupt images butt up in stanzas metrically (but not logically) through-composed.

Davie wrote about Pound a decade later:

“… like Michelangelo leaving some portion of stone unworked in his sculptures, the poet will deliberately seek an effect of improvisation, of haste and rough edges. For only in this way can he be true to his sense of the inexhaustibility of the human and non-human nature he is working with…”

This is a poetics, but it is at the risk of flaws Eliot finds in Samuel Johnson.

“Great poetry of the type of The Vanity of Human Wishes is rare; and we cannot reproach Johnson for not writing more of it, when we consider how little of such poetry there is. Yet this type of poetry cannot rise to the highest rank. It is, by its nature, of rather loose construction; the idea is given at the start, and as it is one universally accepted, there can be but little development, only variations on the one theme. Johnson did not have the gift of structure. For a more elaborate construction – and structure I hold to be an important element of poetic composition – a variety of talents – descriptive, narrative and dramatic – are required. We do not ordinarily expect a very close structure of a poem in rhymed couplets, which often looks as if, but for what the author has to say, it might begin or end anywhere.”

I think this is how Davie structured, even though he wrote in more than rhyming couplets; he was regularising but bitty. Except when Davie gives an idea at the start, it is not always worked through. Moreover where there is an idea in it, and variation on the theme, the idea is not the overt one – it is not known, it is something visceral, a feel. Rough hewn draft material had best not be overworked but find a place in collage, on a quern. Thus the collections are bitty (with very fine bits).

Consider this about his wartime experience:

AFTER THE CALAMITOUS CONVOY (JULY 1942)

An island cast

its shadow across

the water. Where

they sat upon

the Arctic shore

it shadowed them.

The mainland rose

tawny before

their eyes and closed

round them in capes

the island must

have slid from, once.

Under one horn

of land not quite

naked, above

the anchorage

white masonry

massed round a square.

From there one gained

the waterfront

by, they perceived,

a wooden stair

that wound down through

workshops and godowns.

Admiringly

their eyes explored

make-do-and-mend:

arrangements that

the earth lent - stairs,

cabins on struts,

stages of raised

catwalks between

stair and railed stair,

staked angles, ramps

and landings in

the open air.

Roof of the world,

not ceiling. One

hung to it not

as flies do but

as steeplejacks

move over rungs.

Survivors off

the Russian run,

years later they

believed the one

stable terrain

that Arctic one.

This poem appeared in Davie's 1977 volume In The Stopping Train. But can you visualise it? In 1982, he describes the same harbour, Polyarno, in prose:

“An island cast its big shadow across the water and over us. The mainland rose steeply and curved round into two horns, high cliffs, where it almost met the extremities of the island to make two narrow passages of water, leading to the open sound. The horn on our left, as we looked inland, was nearer and higher. We saw now that the land was not quite bare but covered with low tough bushes. Just below this heathy bluff, and still high above the anchorage, was a building of white stone round three sides of a square. This, we would find out, was the barracks for the submarine-crews when ashore, and the principal Red Fleet establishment in the place. Below this again, a colony of small wooden sheds, with an occasional stone building, trailed over a last big knoll down to the level of the waterfront, round what looked in the distance like flights of wooden steps. From there the waterfront, the wooden jetty, ran almost straight towards us, through a rough barricade about halfway along, where a naval sentry stood. Along the shoreward side of the jetty was a broken line of timber sheds, go-downs, naval storehouses and workshops.”

This is beautifully visualisable prose and needs no accompanying photo. The prose description revisits, surely, the poem, copying over phrases and elaborating. This could be because, if we think of Davie as having been as capable of describing the scene as he later does in prose, he made too many leaps – or we could say there were too many excisions to a draft. Perhaps though, on the contrary, it could have been done with a bitten-off, we might say averse, feel of someone bringing up painful memories, working with destabilising subject matter. Or, it could have been self-indulgent. The key phrase for me is at the end: Davie sympathises with those looking for “stable terrain”. And for Davie, a writer who could sit down at this typewriter and bash out copy at speed (so one of his best critics, Martin Dodsworth, once described him to me), sentence and stanza per se could be his “stable terrain”, his rough hunk of stone arrived at quickly, clung to.

Morrissey talks about the speed of Davie's restless mind, but for me this description can be an excuse at a distance for not dealing with unpalatable stances, waiting for him to gesture at capitulation (as indeed he sometimes did) or soften. Not speed but the prolific sums up Davie; and a fear capitulation will capsize him. I see “the grid” of his “Poem as Abstract” poem not so much holding open as hoarding possible lifelines – and the result is a clutter in an elegant box of grids. Dialectic might be travestied if the wrong selection is made, if something crucial is jettisoned (3).

We see in the instinct of hoarding ingredients a fear of going back to the drawing board, a touch of the “first thought best thought” ethos of a group of poets Davie took only glancing formal influence from (I suspect from throwing their books aside unread): the Beats. Just as Bunting picked up on and rode along with the Nambla-keen Ginsberg and some of the (male) sexual free spirits among his younger peers, while Davie took a superego position when he surveyed say the Children of Albion anthology, so too in Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology did Olson, Creeley, Dorn sit in temporary truce alongside the superficially and sometimes substantially different Beats and the New York School poets. The influence of the Beats and the NY school was minimal, only something in the air. Generally the sixties ethos was one Davie reacted against and suffered for as Vice Chancellor at the University of Essex. He certainly disowned English 60s-isms. Morrissey in her introduction weights a comment about this with a spicy superficiality:

“Like a mirror of the Cold War, Davie's sense of Englishness and of belonging to a distinctively English poetic tradition was tugged at and complicated from two directions: America and Russia. A poem such as 'Morning' is unquestionably indebted to the Americans, even – and he may well have winced at this – to the dizzy immediacy of The New York School. 'Let all that go: / Better things throng these nondescript, barged-through streets/(The sun! The February sun, so happily far and hazy...) /Than a mill of ideas', he writes, echoing Frank O'Hara.”

These are not Davie's models at all, and overemphasizes his Russian side – which comes out much more in Morrissey's Selected than it does in any other Davie Selected or Collected, and looks forced. Her book draws on almost all Davie's poems about Russia and his Russian translations, as indeed it draws on almost all his poems about Ireland. It picks for the rest the Christian ones and those with the best catchphrases. But it misses poems where stances are really complex. It avoids the heavy number clearly written in archives. So her Selected is William Carlos Williams without Paterson, Olson without The Maximus Poems, Pound without The Cantos. Morrissey says she doesn't want to bring in Davie's longer poems (which are never, bar the Forests of Lithuania volume, that long anyway), but it feels like her selection disrespects almost phobically Davie's forays into lyric-plus-archive poetics. They were a vital engine to him, as Augustan work on diction was to Wordsworth.

And as for O'Hara! That Coke-sipping Lady Day, list-making, pop art style referencing chatterer may well be a favourite of university students beginning creative writing. He may add a second term to their woeful lack of reading and stuffy habits of composition. But one can have nearly no sense of Davie's habits or mind to see O'Hara as any kind of magnetic pole (4).

“Dizzy” or not, Davie was interested in abrupt disordered American expansiveness of scope and it led him to write many typically Davie poems that Morrissey leaves out of her selection. He was interested in very different and more dense American poets than most undergraduates read.

And his interests and reservations were technical. Here are some of his thoughts from an essay collected in Two Ways Out of Whitman, on various new critical books about American poetry. It first appeared in the Winter 1981 issue of Southern Review. He says of he and Helen Vendler that they

“daily meet people (for instance, students) who suppose that poetry is a legendary beast to be approached with caution and skirted whenever possible. It is obviously true that poetry is eminently natural, since the impulse to make it and enjoy it appears to be a constant in human nature, through the ages and in every society we have records of. And yet... isn't it a constant only in the sense of a constant potentiality, a potentiality that in many ages and societies, notably in our own, most people do not actualize?”

He then wants to differ from Vendler, whom he quotes about C.K. Williams:

[Vendler]: “Williams is a speech poet, riding on the inflections of American voices, refusing epigram, conclusion, and distillation in favor of narrative, digressions, interpolations, and, above all, a buttonholing assertion of the interest of the whole hectic organism which his poems see as life."

Davie's response to Vendler expands from a verbal reply he imagines a section of American poetry different from O'Hara would give. He writes:

“Most of the readers of the Southern Review, and most of the poets who appear there, would surely answer: ‘No, getting American speech down is not something for which I'll trade distillation and conciseness.’ On the other hand, admirers of Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara, even of Whitman (the three names Mrs. Vendler invokes in relation to C. K. Williams), would surely tend to reply: ‘Yes, the bargain is a good one – what's so great about the epigrammatic anyhow?’ And it is surely these latter, those who would strike the bargain, whose voices are heard most often.”

Davie uses this point to describe himself and only a few others as against the tide, being more loyal to the Modernists and, indeed, a further subsection loyal to the epigrammatic 18th century. He shows, again, what he adds to the mix, to postmodernise postmodernism. He elaborates this in moving from Vendler to a book by Jerome Mazzaro, which he uses to characterise not a straw man but a dialectic:

“postmodernism… parochially… originates – so Mazzaro interestingly argues – with Auden, and oddly enough with Auden while he was still living in Britain, not after he'd become a New Yorker. More precisely, post-modernism originates not with the youthful Auden himself, but with what American readers made of that British poet after they'd been reading him for some years. And no one of those American readers was more important than Randall Jarrell. Helen Vendler says, unkindly I think (and she's not usually unkind), that Jarrell ‘put his genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry.’ But certainly Jarrell's criticism has been, and still is, vastly more influential than his poems; and he was influential not just through print but in his lifetime through conversation – notably on his friend Robert Lowell. This was very important because it meant that postmodernism was then espoused not just by the O'Haras and Ginsbergs, those whom Helen Vendler calls ‘speech poets’ (among whom I wish she could have brought herself to consider Ed Dorn), but also by those more formal and even academic poets whom Mazzaro considers: Roethke and Ignatow, Berryman and Plath and Elizabeth Bishop. The attention to American speech-habits indeed is only one, and not the most important, characteristic of postmodernism.”

There is so much here: note “parochially” as a dig at a postmodernism less international than modernism. There is a slight woundedness against Vendler mocking Jarrell in ways that might extend to himself. There is a movement beyond more crude dialectics (say between rhyme and what's “dizzying”) to look at how despite apparent strong differences over which camps rebel there is a uniting and fearful parochial speech poetics. We should note too the fascinated not-quite-dealing with Auden, who appears in Thom Gunn's elegy for Davie as someone Davie is happily reading after having left this vale of literary skirmishes.

Above all, there is a reminder to consider Dorn, whose form on the page, research habits, and interest in geography and geographical formations link Davie to some of the “certain English poets” he addresses (not least the superb Peter Riley, particularly superb in his long poem Alstonefield, written after Davie’s time). A narrowing is done, to cut away Dorn, and indeed Gunn (Morrissey features a long Neil Powell quote about how there are many Davie selecteds possible, including a Larkinesque one, but omits Powell’s next sentences: that Davie’s main consistent resemblance is to Gunn).

This is part and parcel of cutting away from the reader any obligation to make formal, or non-personal, contexts for Davie that aren't very fashionable, while happily throwing irrelevant and less Davie-significant ones into the mix. He had a mutual blood brother bond with Dorn, who called Davie one of his few favoured “heretics”; and also with Gunn. Gunn says in his letters early on that with the three poet-critics Alvarez, Conquest and Davie, he was “politic and sly, mainly because what they say often seems rather plausible and because I’m not always sure what my own theory of poetry” (poets need textual engagement friends). Of the three he wrote more to Conquest and most to Davie.

Gunn was spurred because “I can’t feed on somebody I’m much more like, like Donald Davie, whose work I seem to enjoy only where he is being uncharacteristic”. He says too

“I do admire him, but he is a changeable and difficult man, and I can’t really deal with him as a friend. (At the same time, I remind myself, it was all my fault that he and I had a disagreement a few years ago, from which we never really recovered.) Ultimately, for all his conservativism, he likes to surprise too much and he is too inconsistent. Or maybe those are the sources of his virtues!” (5)

Than Gunn, Ed Dorn is much less read these days, although at least not superficially when he is. Let me quote a little Dorn and a little Davie. First, Dorn:

Now Davie:

Sinead Morrissey clearly likes (as do I) the book To Scorch or Freeze, “Davie's late masterpiece”, from which this poem comes, and sees it as follows: “God's absence is manifested in sentence fragments and blasted typography. It is perhaps impossible to write convincing religious poetry in the late twentieth century without an acknowledgement of the challenges belief in God poses first. Accordingly, To Scorch or Freeze is riddled with doubt and contradictions, and these are, as ever, scrupulously delineated.”

But I'm not sure she recognises the provenance of the typography, which is far from blasted, but stepped. It plays kitten games on typewriter indents, as Dorn did. Unlike O’Hara, Dorn was deadly serious and deadly sarcastic, and with a research interest in an area of science not ready currency with the average poetry consumer. He also depicted himself as the comic stooge of his own fancies and tendencies as if from a starting point of “what's the harm”, chattily quantifying. When we read the Davie passage after the Dorn, we see the piety working unashamedly next to a sense of mischief more hungover than hangdog.

“Importunately/inopportune” is exactly the hoarded fragment which nags; there is a dare rather than an insecurity in breaking the line at “blessed is he that cometh in…”. This poem isn't doing that pernicious modern British thing of adding in gaps and indents because they look groovy or faux-wild. It's working with and against the rhyming and the possible heckles It’s a serious aestheticist wanting others with good ears and reading to keep him from over-pomposity.

3.

Perhaps a word here about how long poems have their own effective rules of diction, and the diction acclimatises and seduces the reader more than in a collection of separate poems. I have sometimes had the reservation that it’s possibly unfair and envious of Davie to demand a trained reader be alert and alerted to diction in other than a long poem. A diction habit is all too apparent and naturally and pleasurably acquired in reading Canterbury Tales, Fairie Queene, Paradise Lost, Essay on Man, Prelude, Don Juan, Four Quartets. I speculate that, for all that Davie's critical work helps us empathise with minor poets, all of this takes away the chastening requirement that we should read long poems and try to write long at some point. Davie has the slightly cheating found poem work of Forests of Lithuania, but not the full epic – and I wonder if say in “Ars Poetica” he was letting go not just about poetics but of ever writing a good long poem. Some of his slightly islanded consciousness of disgust gives up writing long. Certainly, Eliot's ability to write long poems takes away some of the rancour and ferocity that Davie has. It does interesting things for Auden too, with whom (as Gunn saw) Davie was in an odd relation. Where Auden is floaty, Eliot and Joyce are much more complicit in rapacious sexuality. Perhaps they were complicit where Davie was not, and that was the cost of long poems in the twentieth century – too high for Davie. (6)

I have outlined a little what I see as the Davie “powerful feeling”, walking around on his hands. Through a large range of observations, and a huge number of books read for period styles, he rhythmically tapped out journal jottings. There remains too the joyous hallucinating discombulated other of trying to approach poems in other languages.

Davie spoke often of the ribbed syntax of, for example, Russian, and the firmness of meaning when word endings guide emphasis. He admired translation as an art form, in himself and others, and liked a living translation with some slang and verve. He also saw the best translators as showing wide reading and a choice of styles from the English canon. Yet his own translations have an otherness otherwise disallowed in his own poems. Davie's translations attempted to blaze a trail for him.

Morrissey gives us a great opportunity with two choices in her selection to see this at work, and, although it's not flagged up in her introduction I'm not going to assume it's just that she liked both, and didn't see a connection. Like Davie, she has certain codes, and one is to stick in her selection to the page order from the 2002 Powell Collected (who has the poems over 40 pages apart, and notes on “Boyhood Misremembered” the following: “From Times Literary Supplement, 26 December 1968… a substantially different version of ‘Looking out from Ferrara’”); Morrissey reproduces all the full collections in chronological order of full book publication, with some outtakes between the cracks. As a result we get “Boyhood Misremembered” and “Looking out from Ferrara” only five pages apart. Even though it would have been useful to have them right next to each other as below, and even though there isn't a good architectural reason to choose both and keep them apart, a code is a code, and indicates, I would say, a respect hard to fault when facing such prickly particularity as Davie's. In her Selected’s beached carcass, a way is found to steer him into the very odd second decade of the 21st century. Here is the original and here are the two poems from the Selected:

DOPO LA SAGRA

Non resti nella piazza che un bimbo, che al nembo lontano

turchino e obliquo sopra le piccole fattorie luminose

della piana sorrida, e distacchi dalla torre bruna le rose,

dolci campane immense con l'esile addio della sua mano.

S'apra dalle vie l'ombra dell'umile, vecchio sobborgo più tardi

al sussurrato pegno d'un lungo vento di primavera,

che ci riporti dai campi l'infanzia assonnata, i carri caldi

d'oscura erba e di amari papaveri ad alta sera.

Here is the Google translate version:

AFTER THE FESTIVAL

Let only one child remain in the square, in the distant cloud

blue and oblique above the small bright farms

of the plain smile, detach the roses from the brown tower,

sweet immense bells with the slender farewell of his hand.

The shadow of the humble, old suburb opens up from the streets later

to the whispered pledge of a long spring wind,

may he bring us back from the fields the sleepy childhood, the warm wagons

of dark grass and bitter poppies at high evening.

Here is Davie on p77 of Morrissey’s selection:

LOOKING OUT FROM FERRARA

after Giorgio Bassani

It needs there to be no one

Left in the piazza,

Only a boy on his own,

For the thunderhead that shelves

Its far slateblue over small

Lit farms in the plain, to be dealt with

Smilingly. Nor is there

Need of more than his hand

Sketching a smudged goodbye,

Before the thunder edges

Clear of the pinkish mild

Immensity of acres.

And then there is spread abroad

About the roads the darkling

Shade of an old and humble

Townland of that locale,

With, passing across it, the long

Wind of the Spring that will make

Promises some time soon

In whispers, and the drowse

Of boyhood is borne off the meadows

Freighted as high as the evening;

Warm in the wagons the dusky

Grasses, the acrid poppies.

Here is Davie on p82 of Morrissey’s selection:

BOYHOOD MISREMEMBERED

It needs there to be no one

Left on Market Hill

But a boy, for out by Smithies

The thunderhead that shelves

Its far slateblue over small

Lit farms in the east, to be dealt with

Smilingly; nor is there

Need of more than his hand

Sketching a smudged goodbye,

For the towering weather to edge

Clear of the pinkish mild

Expanse of the smoky acres.

It was by Hoylandswaine

Or making towards Ingbirchworth

Not Thurgoland, as I had it,

We came to the ancient shippon.

Fancy my forgetting!

I had remembered or

Fancied I had remembered

Leading the hay, the smell

Of poppies. Yes. So far then

Oblivion extends

Its slateblue ledge, so soon it

Shafts its unearthly russets.

I am reminded looking at these of some plagiarists, though not plagiarism. They beg many questions I don't think Davie wanted begged (there is no indication he ever wanted these two poems together in any individual book). The original Italian poem is in two quatrains with ABAB rhymes, and the first twelve lines of the twenty-four in each Davie poem similarly mark a first half, but three times more lines. The vocabulary is much more rarefied, not common, but close to a thing as strange as poeticised diction: there is therefore lots of work for the reader. It's even more strange by comparison with the Italian and sets up and conveys some of the longing for Italy in Davie, a positive place of longing not there in his thoughts for Russia, and appeased a little by the California he found himself in (not least at the close of his Ars Poetica as it names Ayrton). Italy is all over his lovely Events and Wisdoms book, and done in the teeth of the Kingsley Amis line that we should have no more poems about foreign cities, which Davie quotes in the epigraph to another of his poems about Italy, “Via Portello”. It is indeed in the context of travel that he can remember Barnsley Cricket Club fondly and even the East England of Cambridgeshire and Essex that Morrissey describes as “the English South-East” (since the South-East is Kent, where I grew up, it's perhaps advisable that she steered away from trying to represent his book The Shires in her selecting).

I can see him making these first twelve lines, pretty much exactly common to both of his poems. He ponders the feel and the images of the original, how they contrast and land in order. It's an unusual version of the verses, but, to my ear, with a similar longing. These first twelve lines make a block of sound, with its own rules of typography when on the page. Having considered the translation done, I can see Davie loosening it from context, enjoying its abstract camera track and montage, and then applying that to personal content. Or perhaps these are two attempts at the same translation, the second trying local place names. Whichever it is, longing and melancholy remain consistent, but with the wonderment that suffering can open revelation: something larger. The clump of arrived-at text dances to whatever shadow it can cast.

There is some of Pound's sense of fugue form, and Pound's love of quoting his own past lines, but British. It normally takes the sense of fanbase (say, that the Beatles had) for an English poet to do this, and with a British sense of limited shelf life, and not Pound's monumentality. Watching Davie begin a Yorkshire poem, a non-memory conjured up by a procedure, one sees the trickster, the naughty poet, the formal worker with hamstrung habits. It's very Davie, and, in its particular combination, shows what is and can be combined, and why it's all about humility. Reading him with demystification must only come via a long reading list.

At the same time, there is great skill with pattern, extending Massini's statuesque lines of rhymed quatrain, plain diction and clear clauses. Davie's choice of stubby and cascading stanzas demands our concentration and rewards it. The words are all within general vocabulary, and yet feel oddly dandified next to the original Italian. They are not there to emulate the sound of the original, though some spirit comes across, beyond the ability of many other translators to convey. Nothing in the poem would have improved by making the whole effort slang. And yet when making it more local, when using it as a sort of template and making its reference points Yorkshire places, there is an effect of teaching the general reader names she may not know, insisting on the cultural life the poet knows better than her. There is also pure language play with names.

I return again to Eliot, the foundational poet-critic so important to Davie that he couldn't quite take him on the way he took on Pound. Eliot was also a champ that Bunting couldn't quite square up to the way he could Pound. Davie’s use of place names in these translations can both resemble and annoy T.S. Eliot. Eliot would itemise the hills of London, but do so with a sort of urbanity of being in the city at the centre of the publishing world, a sort of name-dropping cool. Eliot objected when John Milton itemised place names from extra-textual biblical research (although as Milton's first commentators noted, Milton has a genuine interest in where the real Eden might have been, in the Middle East). Perhaps Eliot didn't like names woven into a tight prosody not overtly prosaic. Certainly he was agitated by Milton using too many proper nouns, and he might have been by Davie doing it – Larkin and others disliked Davie using too many names they didn’t recognise.

Here is Eliot quoting and elucidating his general take on Milton, without looking up the references perhaps (one of the moments where Eliot would say he was reacting as poet and not as critic, perhaps when it got too personal, too extra-cultural):

“There seems to me to be a division, in Milton, between the philosopher or theologian and the poet; and, for the latter, I suspect also that this concentration upon the auditory imagination leads to at least an occasional levity. I can enjoy the roll of ...

Cambula, seat of Cathaian Can

And Samarchand by Oxus, Temir's throne,

To Paquin of Sinaean kings, and thence

To Agra and Lahor of great Mogul

Down to the golden Chersonese, or where

The Persian in' Ecbatan sate, or since

In Hispahan, or where the Russian Ksar

On Mosco, or the Sultan in Bizance,

Turchestan-born...

and the rest of it, but I feel that this is not serious poetry, not poetry fully occupied about its business, but rather a solemn game.”

In the case of Davie and his Massini translation, indeed his career, I would argue he ran with a brief given him by Eliot, and with exactly the sense that to do otherwise would be a dead-end, while also working out his own predilections. In some ways, Davie influenced nobody, but stands as a useful example of an immediate response to the risk of aberration among his contemporaries that Eliot foresaw. In England, they were too surly; in North America, too slangy after an initial exciting birth – like Shelley's from Samuel Johnson, where Shelley walked around in the space cleared made for more typefying and less tight poems. One can bring in a little local colour, and even manage to decentre the publishing capitols and their cool, but without dead end experimentation (I'm talking as much about the chatty mainstream here, Bishop as much as O'Hara) or mandarin languor. I'm fascinated, in other words, by how Davie's career can be said to have wrestled manfully with the following from the angel Eliot:

“If every generation of poets made it their task to bring poetic diction up to date with the spoken language, poetry would fail in one of its most important obligations. For poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly: a development of language at too great a speed would be a development in the sense of a progressive deterioration, and that is our danger to-day. If the poetry of the rest of this century takes the line of development which seems to me, reviewing the progress of poetry through the last three centuries, the right course, it will discover new and more elaborate patterns of a diction now established. In this search it might have much to learn from Milton's extended verse structure; it might also avoid the danger of a servitude to colloquial speech and to current jargon.”

Extended verse structure and resisting a development of poetic diction that would outmode some dictionary use shows, in Davie’s Massini translation, at least a respect for the obligations and basic housekeeping that Eliot made a wide reading poet critic's conscience. At the same time, combining Eliotic guru status with Poundian archive work and some of the first thought best thought ebullience of the Beats was a fascinating roe to hoe.

4.

Using an example of comparative takes (not drafts) whets the appetite for looking at all Davie's work. Consider another two approaches to a translation, but this time with the twist that it is a kind of found poem made out of somebody else's translation. In 1957, Davie brought out his only book-length long poem, although, being in chapters, it is still cheating; and, given he didn't know the source language (Polish), even more so.

Davie made a selection from an existing prose translation of Pan Tadeusz; or, The last foray in Lithuania, by Adam Mickiewicz, translated by George Rapall Noyes, Dent, 1917. His first foray into the foray was from one section alone and appeared in A Winter Talent. This is presented after the Noyes prose version. The second foray was to take on more of the original but in shorter choppier lines throughout. This is presented last. Comparing them shows, I think, how Davie kneads and pulls material; although, again, Davie does not make a new take on the collage when reworking it as part of this larger (yet stubbier) new approach. He is drawn to maintain his previous draft, and chop that up differently.

1. (from PAN TADEUSZ, in the Noyes translation)

"Here was an open grove, with a floor of turf; over this green carpet, among the white trunks of the birches, under the canopy of luxuriant drooping boughs, roamed a multitude of forms, whose strange dance-like motions and strange costumes made one think them ghosts, wandering by the light of the moon. Some were in tight black garments, others in long, flowing robes, bright as snow ; one wore a hat broad as a hoop, another was bare-headed ; some, as if they had been wrapt in a cloud, in walking spread out on the breeze veils that trailed behind their heads as the tail behind a comet. Each had a different posture: one had grown into the earth, and only turned about his downcast eyes; another, looking straight before him, as if in a dream, seemed to be walking along a line, turning neither to the right nor to the left. But all continually bent down to the ground in various directions, as if making deep bows. If they approached one another, or met, they did not speak or exchange greetings, being in deep meditation, absorbed in themselves. In them the Count saw an image of the shades in the Elysian Fields, who, not subject to disease or care, wander calm and quiet, but gloomy.

Who would have guessed that these people, so far from lively and so silent, were our friends, the Judge's comrades? From the noisy breakfast they had gone out to the solemn ceremony of mushroom-gathering; being discreet people, they knew how to moderate their speech and their movements, in order under all circumstances to adapt them to the place and time."

2. THE MUSHROOM GATHERERS

(after Mickiewicz)

Strange walkers! See their processional

Perambulations under low boughs,

The birches white, and the green turf under.

These should be ghosts by moonlight wandering.

Their attitudes strange: the human tree

Slowly revolves on its bole. All around

Downcast looks; and the direct dreamer

Treads out in trance his lane, unwavering.

Strange decorum: so prodigal of bows,

Yet lost in thought and self-absorbed, they meet

Impassively, without acknowledgement.

A courteous nation, but unsociable,

Field full of folk, in their immunity

From human ills, crestfallen and serene.

Who would have thought these shades our lively friends?

Surely these acres are Elysian Fields.

3. (From FORESTS OF LITHUANIA)

Meanwhile the judge had mustered

Mushroom-gatherers, whom,

Once more self-communing,

The Count mistook. For see!

Strange walkers these, in their

Processional parade

To and fro under low boughs,

Around them the birches white

And the turf green under.

These should be ghosts by moonlight.

Strange their attitudes : see

Slowly revolve on its bole

The human tree; all around

Downcast looks; and the dreamer

Direct in trance

Treading his lane

Undeviating. Strange

Decorum this that, prodigal

Of bows, will have them meet

Impassively, without

Acknowledgement, a nation

(So self-absorbed) polite

And yet unsociable.

Field full of folk, in their

Immunity from harm

Crestfallen and serene.

Who would have thought these shades

Our lively friends? Are these

Acres Elysian fields?

This is a Poundian experiment, working in the field of what Ron Silliman called the path of the Objectivists, with the poles of Pound and William Carlos Williams, rather than the path of the haughty mainstreamers like Berryman and Lowell with their poles of Pound and T.S. Eliot. Culling from documents and editing them is much more an Objectivist method, notably one mostly rejected by their contemporary British wing (Bunting).(7)

Yet more than a Poundian gesture, Davie is making a post-Poundian one. It is the Zukofsky of 'A' with which Davie here is a bedfellow, particularly the 21st section of ‘A’. This should remind us that Davie never quite fits his critical practice to his poetry or either to his contemporaries, for he avoided the monumental 'A' and concentrated mainly on Zukofsky's short lyrics. He met Zukofsky though, and oh to have been a fly on the wall. He glances at the encounter in his poem "The Bent": "poets/have treated me with as much/compassionate gentleness as/we might ascribe to centaurs/finding within their troop/either a man or a horse".

In 'A' 21, Zukofsky works from the Loeb translation of Plautus' Latin play, Rudens. He versifies it against its measure into 5 word lines one at a time, sometimes departing by outrageous puns and deliberate homophone misconstruings, but in doing so keeps to a new regular measure of his own. It is just absurd enough in its new measure. The acknowledged silliness of it despite the fidelity to getting most of the meaning across represents a pole I'm not sure Davie wanted to hark to mentally as much as he perhaps did physically. Zukofsky cared about the cultural meaning of the Plautus, as Davie cared about the meaning of Pan Tadeusz (particularly, again, the winter talent of dourness becoming an unheard almost spiritual motor memory). But they are both ultimately more silly than Pound, and ultimately playful and indeed best read with several books they're working from, and notebooks, open.

Whatever held back Davie from Zukofsky was, I suspect, revulsion at a more teenage antisocial rebelliousness. What held back Zukofsky and Bunting from Davie was, I suspect, too much fear of ruining the act of shopfront modern style and too much ego. Zukofsky allowed correspondence from Ronald Johnson for playing overt stylistic homage. The kinship of different poets one gets between Davie and Gunn (although interestingly Gunn preferred the early four square version of “The Mushroom Gatherers”, which is less tenable once the versions and archive original are set side by side) or between Davie and Dorn is less superficial, and less superficially piqued. We should think about what this implies when lionising the "big guns". Several Zukofsky fans, but not Robert Duncan, admire Zuk's pluck for homophonic translation of Catullus but say little about his work from Plautus. In performance, Barrett Watten found 'A' 21 boring and unsatisfactory. It perhaps requires setting texts alongside each other with more strings attached than many readers like to attach. Readers like to see the Latin of Catullus on facing pages with Louis and Celia's versions as slabs, the Latin pretty much inert, and fine to smash: the way Michelangelo wouldn't.

(1) For example, in the critical book that in my opinion has most influenced my sixties born generation, Under Briggflatts, he quotes C.H. Sisson's poem:

This corner of the world would be my mind;

What it saw I would say, if it were cloud,

Blue sky or even wind told by an eddy:

But what I would not see is this body,

Aged, severe and, written on it, REFUSE.

Davie comments: “‘Refuse’ can be accented on the first syllable, as a noun, or on the second, as a verb; and this uncertainty, so far from being an enriching ambiguity, is surely a flaw in the poem.”

Davie loved a bodying rhythm. Perhaps for him Sisson flubbed the high stakes, the innuendo set up for Socratic sobering. Or Davie disliked that Sisson had muddied the play of etymology.

One could further argue that here was an important push away from Larkin. Several of the words in Larkin's poem Cut Grass land with a nebulous clunk, and it's interesting that Larkin was testy about being over-interpreted: in other words when etymology and ambiguity was analysed.

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

If we look at “high-builded” and even Queen Anne (of the troublesome reign in English history), there is a general hankering not for nature, but the usual Larkin one of feeling tragic nostalgia, and anti-urban. Yet none of this is for the poet to advise upon. So the apparent inherited riches of resonant plural vocabulary are the poet's compensation and also how the poet is bought off and tamed. And prose is not written like this. And Davie would have none of it, for all the surface resemblances.

(2) The same is true of two uses of the same Pasternak line in his writings. It is used in PoDiEV and his (later) poem “Ars Poetica”: “Most poems, or the best,/Describe their own birth, and this/Is what they are – a space/Cleared to walk around in”. The acknowledgment isn’t made explicit, although the Russian is name-checked; it's useful that Morrissey glosses it. Davie never quite lets go of the idea his ideal reader would know or hyperlink to the whole Davie oeuvre. Once Davie has quoted “every poem describes its own birth” anywhere, it is held. A line can extend to future use.

Morrissey omits from PoDiEV, that Davie glosses the nice-sounding catchphrase as potentially treacherous. He brings in Wordsworth where Morrissey does not. Davie worries in PoDiEV that Wordsworth and Pasternak are running the risk of self-regard, creating something (as Milton has Satan say) that believes it is self-made, with no humility. In Alec Brown's 1958 translation, here is the passage in Pasternak's autobiography Safe Conduct that Davie is using:

“There is a psychology of creativeness, of the problem of poetics. But of all art this is precisely the origin which is most immediately experienced, and one should not produce guess-work about it… We cease to recognize reality. It appears to us as a totally new category, which seems to us as its own state, not ours. Apart from that state, everything in the world has been labelled. Only this is new and unlabelled. We try to give it a name. We get art. The clearest, most memorable and important feature of art is how it arises, and in their telling of the most varied things, the finest works in the world in fact all tell us of their own birth. It was in this period I am now talking about that I first understood this, in all its broad implications.”

This, not least with its potential flashpoint of “we cease to recognise reality” is counter to the antidote poetics of veto that Davie was establishing for his era. Because he loved Pasternak and Wordsworth, he made troubled allowance, with a warning he might have to part ways. Exception roulette can deliver dangerous precedent, after all. For quoting Pasternak not to be a rattle bag workshop prompt, it must weave into Davie's mercurial unweighed web.

Note the pun on “describe” Davie flirts with, when putting his quote into a poem; and stretching his web. “Describe” is not a pun in the Russian. “Describe” sets out a space, to flesh out the floundering metaphor of walking around in a poem. Davie flounders too over his dedicatee: Michael Ayrton.

Ayrton, a painter admired of Wyndham Lewis as much as sculptor, was a similarly gruff English artist and polemicist brought out of himself in Italian climes; he and Davie were holiday neighbours. In his poem, Davie gets the Pasternak quote more faithful (adding best/finest, upping the stakes). But the pun on “describe” is necessary only to stop us thinking. Overall in the poem Davie extemporises on a tiddled-sounding nostalgic reverie.

The same happens in his late-ish poem “Penelope” with its odd refrain of “and all right so” – a heartfelt but potentially naff stage-Oirishism. So much throat-clearing by theme, expert larynx movement, pray silence, taps glass.

(3) There will be irony (never sniggering) in places, the drama of the unreliable narrator enriching our understanding of him while overstated or deluded.

(4) Indeed, I wonder if Morrissey is being extra textual here and is familiar with Davie's homophobia about O'Hara, and getting a dig in. See the following from a letter to Davie from Thom Gunn (May 17, 1982). Gunn says, in what looks like a reply to a worry Davie has expressed about being homophobic:

“No, I don’t think I’ve ever thought of you as a scourge of the gays. But perhaps be more careful what you write in private letters to Marjorie Perloff. She shows round her letters (not to me, I hasten to say, since I don’t know her). She showed one to Robert Duncan, in which you thank her for her book about O’Hara, and apparently go on to say that you don’t think that a homosexual (except, you rather sweetly said, for me) could write good poetry. I’ve thought about this statement for several years, and I still don’t know how you could deny the title of poet to say Marlowe or Whitman. But of course it is unfair for anybody to show around private correspondence which is intended in a specific context; and also one shouldn’t gossip, as I have just done…I do bring up the letter to Marjorie Perloff not for the purposes of gossip but because it does strengthen my feeling that your writing in that page or so of the Pound book is perhaps more personal than you believe. Might one also hazard a guess that you do not approve of abortion?”

It is interesting to note here that Gunn takes a moral position about the sharing of private correspondence not unlike Davie's in his Against Confidences: “Loose lips now/Call Candour friend/whom Candour brow/when clear contemned”.

Here is Perloff's own account of the same.

“During a later visit to LA (he spent one Thanksgiving with us), I showed Don [Allen] a letter I had received from Donald Davie, whom I knew fairly well as a colleague on the academic conference circuit, about my O’Hara book. To my dismay, Davie, whose work on Pound I really admired, wrote angrily that I was wrong to write a book on O’Hara. He hated Frank’s openly gay, campy, overtly sexual love poems likeo'You are gorgeous and I’m coming’ and indeed insisted in the letter that gay men couldn’t write good poetry anyway, given that the Muse is female — a rather amazing statement even back in 1978. Davie made an exception for ‘the tragic case of Thom Gunn’ — tragic evidently because unlike O’Hara and his chums, Gunn had struggled against his sexual proclivities. Don found this reference to ‘tragic’ highly amusing and evidently told Robert Duncan about it. The word got back to Davie who never forgave me for showing his letter to someone, the incident becoming a kind of cause celèbre in San Francisco.”

http://jacketmagazine.com/25/perl-allen.html

So far so bad, and if Morrissey does know about this, her gossip indicates she is prepared to believe homophobia the reason why Davie “may well have winced”.

(5) Here is an analysis from Clive Wilmer in the Gunn letters:

“In a review of The Passages of Joy, Davie implied that being open about his homosexuality had diminished TG’s poetry. ‘I’m terrifically grateful for that essay and for everything Donald has written about me. I think it has been consistently insightful,’ TG responded (PR 180): ‘I don’t think he’ll any longer be able to make that connection in light of The Man with Night Sweats. Let me say that I also respect Donald so much that something that was in my mind the whole time I was writing this new book was: how can I show him that he’s wrong?!’”

It is patronising to see this only as gay self-hatred, to be only excused, in someone whom by implication we thereby need to sentimentalise.

(6) Also worth speculating that seeing Davie's secondhand diction aesthetic as “foundational” when it is actually Eliotic shows our era, not least its creative writing gurus, as isolated skimmers. We can well see Davie as having a chip on his shoulder, because there are so many chips on ours: so little holism and chastening wisdom in our own modern poetics. And yet… Morrissey leads me to read Davie, and challenge her reading; Davie leads me to want to make a reading, which then accidentally chimes with other reading in poetry and poetics I'm doing. Bitterness as well as bitter reaction to others’ bitternesses is a muse too.

(7) Look at Ezra Pound using and collaging from a source, as discussed by David Trotter in his fine poetics book, The Making of the Reader:

1. (A speech by James Kent, in Martin Van Buren to the End of His Public Career by George Bancroft, Harper and Brothers, 1889)

"If we are like other races of men, with similar follies and vices, then I greatly fear that our posterity will have reason to deplore in sackcloth and ashes the delusion of the day. I wish to preserve our Senate as the representative of the landed interest.

...

The tendency of universal suffrage is to jeopard the rights of property and the principles of liberty."

(Pound, Canto 37)

"Kent said they wd. 'deplore in sackcloth and ashes

if they preserved not a senate

to represent landed interest, and did they

jeopard property rights?'"