SOURCE: “The Poetry of Donald Davie,” in The Critical Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4, Winter, 1962, pp. 293-304.

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 of Diction in English Verse, published in 1952. This was ostensibly an academic study of the procedures of various minor eighteenth century poets, together with reflections on later poetry; it contained some admirable literary history, and was full of worthwhile hints for the student of Augustan verse. But Purity of Diction, despite its bland scholarly guise, had a barely concealed polemical purpose. It represented Davie's reaction against the dominant assumptions of twentieth century poetics: that the essence of poetry lay in metaphor, and particularly in the bold or violent collocation of images, and that syntax must inevitably be distorted or broken in the interests of poetic...