SOURCE: "After Sedley, after Pound," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 201, No. 14, November 1, 1965, pp. 311-13.

Davie is a highly regarded English poet, critic, educator, and translator. During the 1950s he was associated with the Movement, a group of poets who emphasized restrained language, traditional syntax, and the moral and social implications of poetic content. In the following review of All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958, Davie compares Zukofsky both to writers of the 1930s who apotheosized intellect and the manipulation of language and to the tradition represented by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

For those who need to know that Picasso could draw a likeness if he chose, Exhibit A is Zukofsky after Sir Charles Sedley:

Would he had writ thus always? Hardly. The high gloss on this elegant pastiche obscures rather than clarifies—certainly on a first reading and even on a second: the suavity of...