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Donald (Alfred) Davie |
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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 ravaged landscape," as he called it, of the West Riding. As a Northerner, he has said that in literature he grew to like "the spare and lean." From his mother, who had a liking for poetry and knew, according to Davie, "the greater part, perhaps the whole" of Francis Turner Palgrave's The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861, 1897) by heart, he developed an early interest in verse. From the art master of Barnsley Grammar School, he learned to appreciate church architecture, an appreciation expressed in a number of his poems. Of Baptist parentage, he was, to quote from an essay written in his fifties, "an Englishman bred ... near to the heart of English Dissenting Protestantism." A considerable part of his critical writing is devoted to a defense of the conservative, orthodox, dissenting tradition--Baptist, Congregationalist, and Presbyterian--which he considers to be--at least in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--rational, intellectual, and enlightened.
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