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 same issues recur, newly formulated and presented, but the same; the truth may be that he is perpetually oscillating between sets of opposite opinions. It does not matter which. His criticism always vibrates with the immediate and pressing interest that poetry in its technical, moral, social, and spiritual realities has for him; it tingles with an air of urgency that vitalizes literary discussion; not infrequently it gives off a brimstone stench of literary warfare. Sometimes I wish he would retire from the fight long enough to settle the internal conflict of ideas. In the fifties the most intelligent and ardent polemicist for the Movement, Davie was also the quickest to see its shortcomings. The pieces in Trying to Explain, mainly about poetry, his own and others', were all published in the seventies; they cover a variety of topics, but in this context what is most striking is the persistence, alongside new interests and some changes of outlook, of Movement attitudes and habits of mind. The moral recoil from the cult of the lyric poet as "one who is absolved from all civic responsibilities and all moral restraints" is as sharp as it ever was. His scorn for "the sublime," in ancient or modern dress, has not relaxed. "Disaffection, resentment, acedia, malaise, 'alienation'—all those fashionable conditions, precisely because in all of them the sufferer 'doesn't know what is wrong with him,' produce in art 'the sublime.'" This comes from an essay in praise of the "clarity" of anger. Is there no room, then, for a lucid uncertainty?… One of the most interesting essays is about Allen Tate's poetry; as so often with Davie at his best, it discloses a deep division of feeling, a fruitful indecision. He speaks of Tate as a great poet and at the same time deplores his "impatient neglect of the literal meaning of his poems in favour of their symbolical or (his own word) anagogical meanings." This is sound radical criticism and is in line with the Movement attack upon the sanctification of metaphor. His way of expressing dissatisfaction with "this besetting fault of Tate's writing" elsewhere in the essay, on the other hand, betrays the weaker side of Movement aesthetics—a concern for getting on good terms with the reader. "One could not fail to remark in [his poems] the lack of that seductive suavity which won us over to Ransom…. Ransom, Hart Crane, even in his austere way Winters, were winning writers in a way that Tate has seldom deigned to be." One may rate social and civic virtues highly and still judge "suavity" and "winning," words from a vocabulary of social charm to which Davie sometimes resorts, to be too lightweight for the purpose; if they are intended to be faintly self-deprecating or provocative (an English tone that doesn't travel well), then their arch modesty undersells a valuable case. (pp. 475-76)
Michael Kirkham, "English Poetry Since 1950," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 3, Summer, 1981, pp. 474-79.∗
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