SOURCE: "Chatterton Lecture on an English Poet: The Poetry of Sir Walter Scott," in Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. XLVII, 1962, pp. 61-75.
An English poet, critic, educator, and translator, Davie is well-respected for both his creative and critical contributions to literature. In his first critical work, The Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), he argued for a return to the prose-like syntax, formal structures, and conservative metaphors of the eighteenth-century Augustan poets. During the 1950s Davie was associated with the Movement, a group of poets whose number included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and Thorn Gunn, who believed in the importance of these qualities. In contrast to English poets of the 1940s, who were influenced by imagism and symbolism, the Movement poets emphasized restrained language, traditional syntax, and the moral and social implications of poetic content. In the following lecture, delivered in 1961, Davie analyzes several technical aspects of Scott's poetry, including grammatical arrangement and color imagery. Though Davie concedes that Scott's verse often lacks structure, the critic also stresses the creative energy expressed in many of the poems and Scott's direct, nonmetaphoric depiction of nature and society.
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