What a pity that Donald Davie is less interesting as a poet than as a critic. Picking up the Collected Poems, as I not infrequently do, I find myself returning constantly to the earliest volumes, Brides of Reason (1955) and A Winter Talent (1957). Here, it seems to me—in 'The Garden Party', 'Remembering the Thirties', 'Hearing Russian Spoken' and 'Rejoinder to a Critic'—he wrote with a confidence and poise that he has never (in verse) quite managed since. The early poems are full of quotations: 'Yet irony itself is doctrinaire', 'A neutral tone is nowadays preferred', 'Abjure politic brokenness for good', 'Appear concerned only to make it scan'.
Note, however, that each and every one of these lapidary pentameters concerns the practice of poetry itself; even at this stage Davie was already the critic, or at any rate the discerning reader. The poems bristle with the names of the great…. If we didn't know that Davie was Barnsley born and bred, we might be forgiven for thinking that he was nurtured in the imaginary museum of his title [The Poet in the Imaginary Museum: Essays of Two Decades]. 'Nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope nobody wants them.' Thus, of course, Kingsley Amis, in a much quoted proscription of 1955; but Davie, despite certain 'Movement' attitudes ('Appear concerned only to make it scan'), was never really a Movement poet at all; cultural exhibits have always been part of his stock-in-trade. As Barry Alpert remarks in his foreword to this collection, the title, liberally interpreted, 'might embrace most of what Donald Davie has written during the past 25 years'….
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