SOURCE: “A Shared Humanity: ‘In the Stopping Train’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’,” in On Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie, edited by Vereen Bell and Laurence Lerner, Vanderbilt University Press, 1988, pp. 89-101.

In the following essay, Jarman contrasts the role of the poet as evinced in Davie's “In the Stopping Train” and Philip Larkin's “The Whitsun Weddings.”

These are my customs and establishments. It would be much more serious to refuse. —Philip Larkin “The Importance of Elsewhere” 

                                                            A man who ought to know me                                                             wrote in a review                                                             my emotional life was meagre. 

—Donald Davie “July, 1964”

In his recent collection of lectures, Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric, Donald Davie argues that, because of twentieth-century history, the lyric poet has lost the privilege of being responsible only to himself and his emotions. Therefore, he must find a way to speak for more than himself. The late...