At a time when we are accustomed to thinking about the lives of poets more in terms of marital chaos, alcoholism, and breakdown than in terms of poetry, it is refreshing to read Donald Davie's memoir [These the Companions], which not only is an episodic account of events and personalities but also is a serious meditation on his lifelong involvement with literature. The two acquaintances whom he remembers most acutely and generously are F. R. Leavis and Yvor Winters, writers he portrays as puritans in their thinking about art. By puritan he means a person of principle, someone for whom not all moral and intellectual judgments are relative, someone who insists "that in the arts, as between the genuine and the fake, or between the achieved and the unachieved, there cannot be any halfway house."
These the Companions is not a book of unqualified praise for puritanism so much as it is a deeply felt reaction against the tendency in himself and in important friends and mentors to divide too brutally the sheep from the goats, the genuine from the fake. What animates his assessment of men like Winters and Leavis and what stands uneasily back of his assessment of his own intellectual and literary habits is a troubled awareness of how an appetite for rigorous and absolute criteria, however necessary, can constrict one's sympathies; yet at the same time he also can acknowledge how sympathy uninformed by principle can degenerate into what he calls "a lax eclecticism," a warm diffusive live-and-let-live attitude which in its impact on the practising artist can be just as harmful. Though at times his antithetical thinking seems like mere ambivalence, for the most part it is a form of generosity or evenhandedness. One might even call it a kind of Keatsian disinterestedness, for it enables Davie to enter imaginatively into positions he opposes or distrusts not to evade judgment but to ground judgment in sympathetic understanding, to judge from the inside, not to label and dismiss. (p. lxviii)
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