Donald Davie Summary

Donald Davie was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, to George Clarke and Alice Sugden Davie, received his early education at Barnsley Holgate Grammar School, and spent his boyhood in "the industrially ravag... Read more

Critical Essay by Calvin Bedient Of all the first-rate poets of the age, Donald Davie is the most notably reactionary. If only with some strain, we might see him, to advantage, as mining in the great... Read more

Critical Essay by Blake Morrison Rationalism, scepticism, fastidiousness, fair-mindedness: the qualities which Donald Davie has claimed for himself over the years are not the qualities we have been t... Read more

Critical Essay by Carol Johnson [Donald Davie's New and Selected Poems] perplexes with flaws of a kind totally unlooked for in the mode he practices. Among several of the better moments of con... Read more

Critical Essay by D. E. Richardson Donald Davie's criticism conveys the sense that the making and criticizing of poems continue to matter. Such critics as Harold Rosenberg have noticed the abs... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Levi The best of Donald Davie's essays [in Trying to Explain] are subtle, reasonable and serious discussions of the detail of [Ezra Pound's] work; they range wid... Read more

Critical Essay by Jerome Mazzaro Donald Davie's In the Stopping Train indicates that [a] tendency toward reduced style [exists in] contemporary English poetry …, though for Davie'... Read more

Critical Essay by Neil Powell [Any account of Davie's] work since 1970 must be at least partly concerned with the tension (at best a creative tension) between Davie and his English audience or... Read more

Critical Essay by Michael Kirkham Davie as a critic has sometimes seemed to the dazed bystander to be in perpetual motion, perpetual transition from one phase of opinion to another. But many of the s... Read more

Critical Essay by Simon Rae Talk of Donald Davie's 'new' collection would not be strictly accurate. Even parts of the title sequence, Three for Water Music, are borrowed from his... Read more

Critical Essay by Valentine Cunningham Donald Davie speaks up for Old Dissent—for its religious life and the literature it generated—with what might be thought of as an aptly persistent... Read more

Critical Essay by Louis Simpson The imagination, Donald Davie says, is concerned with "one particular person, in one place, at one time, in one sort of weather." Therefore [in "T... Read more

Critical Essay by Emily Grosholz Donald Davie's latest book, Three for Water Music, is a composite of three reflections on water and the long poem "The Shires," Davie's id... Read more

Critical Essay by William H. Pritchard There are of course many reasons to be grateful for Donald Davie's continuing presence, but after reading the most recent poems in his volume of collecte... Read more

Critical Essay by Martin Dodsworth The fundamental principle of [Ezra Pound's Cantos is the] attempt to express ideas only in terms of sensory impression, and by its very nature it was bound t... Read more

Critical Essay by Thomas Mckeown [Donald Davie's Ezra Pound] stimulates disagreements of a constructive kind. This alone should be enough to recommend it. Davie gets the year of Pound's... Read more

Critical Essay by Russell Davies In the stopping train is just as full of jolts as it sounds, largely because Davie so often leaps out of his reverie to hang desperately on the communication-cord. Th... Read more

In the following essay, Bergonzi examines stylistic and thematic aspects of Davie's early work. Donald Davie's first book was a cool, rather tough work of literary criticism, Purity o... Read more

In the following essay, Martin analyzes Davie's complex relationship to Ireland and how it affects his poetry. In February 1980 Donald Davie published two poems side by side in the San Franc... Read more

In the following essay, Quinlan explores autobiographical aspects of Davie's Irish poems. Donald Davie was an English don at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1950 until 1957. It was during thes... Read more

In the following essay, Jarman contrasts the role of the poet as evinced in Davie's “In the Stopping Train” and Philip Larkin's “The Whitsun Weddings.” The... Read more