Enlarging Insularity

Patrick McGuinness

• With the Grain: Essays on Thomas Hardy and Modern British Poetry by Donald Davie
  Carcanet, 346 pp, £14.95, October 1998, ISBN 1 85754 394 7

In a recent poem, ‘Languedoc Variorum: A Defence of Heresy and Heretics’, the American poet Ed Dorn honours Donald Davie’s penultimate collection of poems, To Scorch or Freeze (1989), as ‘the most economical rebuke ... this age in moral free-fall is likely to get’. It is Davie’s most experimental poetry book: a series of religious meditations based on the Psalms (he edited The Psalms in English for Penguin) which take their bearings from Pound’s Cantos (he also wrote two ground-breaking books on Pound and numerous essays on the Poundian tradition). Dorn’s homage is apposite, too: his poem is founded on the conviction that heretics have been persecuted because they are, in fact, the only people who really care about religion, putting established cults to shame. Davie, a dissenter rather than a heretic, in religion as in poetry, had his fair share of polemical spats with what he called the poetry ‘establishment’: big commercial publishers and the metropolitan journals (the LRB gets a dishonourable mention in this category).