 |
 |
Ah, but then he wrote Under Briggflatts, in which he found his way back to the moderns, & especially Basil Bunting as exemplar. Doug On 20-Dec-07, at 2:17 PM, Roger Day 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. > > -- > My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/ > "And we're slow to acknowledge the knots on the laces > heart it races" > Architecture in Helsinki > > Douglas Barbour 11655 - 72 Avenue NW Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9 (780) 436 3320 http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/ Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy) http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664 Oh, goddamnit, we forgot the silent prayer. Dwight D, Eisenhower [at a cabinet meeting]