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
On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:27:57 +0000, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>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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