SOURCE: “This That I Am Heir to: Donald Davie and Religion,” in Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature, edited by George Dekker, Carcanet New Press, 1983, pp. 129-42.

In the following essay, Schirmer considers the role of religion in Davie's work.

Even a casual reading of the poetry and criticism of Donald Davie must notice the important place that religion, specifically the Dissenting tradition in England, has always held in his work. Most obviously, a number of the poems in the Collected Poems 1950-1970 concern the Dissenting tradition in general, while others express Davie's own ambiguous response to the particular, Baptist faith in which he was brought up. Moreover, the aesthetic principles that have guided and informed both Davie's poetry and criticism—such ‘classical’ standards as restraint and sparseness, for example—clearly owe something to the rigorous ethical and aesthetic principles of Nonconformity.

In recent years, Davie's concern...