Wow, Barry, fascinating stuff, & it must've been interesting in all
ways.
I came across Davie with his book, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, so
have always thought he was at least somewhat informed on modernism in
poetry. That he was able to represent that group you name below, & then
later see his way to acknowledging Bunting as far more important than
most of his British fellows had noticed, suggests a finely tuned
eclecticism.
Doug
On 20-Dec-07, at 6:08 PM, Barry Alpert wrote:
> Right at the beginning of my graduate studies, I witnessed Donald
> Davie’s
> transition from second-in-command at the University of Essex to Yvor
> Winters’ successor at Stanford University. He liked to put it thus, “I
> replaced Yvor Winters and Robert Lowell replaced me.” I never heard
> that
> he had lost his position at Essex, but he did mention that he had had
> to
> ask his graduate student Tom Clark (who had been highly recommended to
> him
> by Donald Hall) to leave because of reasons I’ll let you imagine. I
> was
> lucky enough to attend the first course Davie gave at Stanford, Modern
> British Poetry, which covered, as I remember, Thomas Hardy, Gerard
> Manley
> Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Two of the so-called
> Stanford Five (the last generation of poets to study directly with Yvor
> Winters) sat in on that class, John Peck and Robert Hass, though Peck
> made
> such a strong impression that I remain a bit uncertain whether Hass was
> indeed present. Perhaps Robert Archambeau’s forthcoming study from the
> University of Notre Dame Press, “Laureates and Heretics”, will set the
> record straight about John Peck, John Matthias, James McMichael, Robert
> Hass, and Robert Pinsky.
>
> The failing AOL software on my computer already “disappeared” my first
> version of this post, so before treating the complex issue of Donald
> Davie’s relationship to modernism, I need a break.
>
>
> Barry Alpert
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