Looking at Amazon, with the grain is a 1998 carcanet edition which
includes a reprint of the 1973 edition of TH & British Poetry. I sold
my copy a while a go.
I'll have to go back and re-read it. I'm pretty sure Davie wasn't
particularly a modernist in any way. Maybe he wasn't in to re-writing
the historical record in that manner.
Davie was I think a VC at that time.
Roger
On Dec 20, 2007 9:52 PM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 'With the Grain', how does that relate to Davie's book, 'TH and British
> Poetry'?
> A few weeks ago I acquired an ex-library copy of
>
> The Poet in the Imaginary Museum
>
> Essays of Two Decades
>
> edited [with a very substantial introduction, I must say] by Barry Alpert
>
> (Carcanet, Manchester, 1977).
>
> Davie's essay 'Hardy's Virgilian Purples' (1972) has a postscript:
>
> 'One thing that excited me in this investigation was the proof it seemed to
> give, that Hardy at his best proceeded in a way not wholly different from
> Pound's way, or Joyce's, or (I could have added) Eliot's. But in the years
> since, the sudden spate of books and essays about Hardy's poetry seems for
> the most part still impelled by a wish to prove that Hardy provides a viable
> insular alternative to the international 'modern movement'. I am quite out
> of sympathy with that sort of endeavour.'
>
> [Was Davie a VC or just an injudicious supporter of a VC who suffered in
> those worrisome campus times?]
>
>
>
>
> On 21/12/07 8:17 AM, "Roger Day" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Donald Davie, writing in With The Grain, was quite taken with Hardy.
> > Saw him as a precursor to modern _English_ poetry - that's England in
> > the country, not the language - making a "direct line" between Hardy
> > and, wait for it, Phil "The Glum"[1] Larkin, skipping out all that
> > messy, and foreign, modernism stuff. Mind you, what happens to those
> > WW1 shirkers? He's not the first or the last to try and do so. If you
> > skip Pound or Eliot or even Thomas and Owen, then you can get back to
> > being pastoral and religious and provincial, buttered scones for tea,
> > the Home Service and all that. Mind you, Davie had an axe to grind -
> > he lost his Vice Chancellorship of some steel-and-glass uni after
> > failing to control a lock-out in the 60s.
> >
> > Anyway, With the Grain is an interesting read nonetheless. Even if I
> > can't remember much about it bar the insularity.
> >
> > Roger
> >
> > [1] That's a Home Service joke BTW.
>
> --
>
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