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'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. --