This warmingly honest message immediately invokes, of course, Ezra
Pound, who wanted nothing more than to address the nation(s), and
destroyed his own poetry in the process. Davie was a Poundian of
sorts, and stands behind both positive and negative forces emanating
(still?) from the direction of Cambridge.
PR
On 7 Aug 2015, at 17:56, [log in to unmask] wrote:
Yes, there's an allure. Imagine being as passionately admired by
future generations as , say, Yeats. Imagine every trivial circumstance
of your life attracting the same wide-eyed fascination of visitors who
go to Dove Cottage in search of the marmalade-covered paper-knife.
Wouldn't that be to walk the earth as a god, albeit a dead one. There
are not many walks of life that hold out such a prospect for long-term
celebrity. (Although I believe it's a thorough delusion, and anyway
there's little reason to believe that modern poets will ever gain the
same aura as our romantic forebears.)
There's also cultural power. The profession of poetry, even today, is
not merely a joke.
The earnings, I suppose, take off once you become well-known enough to
be a columnist.
Needless to say, none of this has anything to do with writing a good
poem.
Donald Davie indeed claimed that a poet ought to be aware of the
dignity of the profession, of the civic responsibility. He still saw
the poet as someone who had the right to address the nation in full
seriousness, and who ought to do so.
Not sure how many would agree with that, or whether most of us would
think it preferable to do exactly the opposite, but you can still see
a bit of that aspiration in Cambridge.
|