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“... confidence: he is forever shuttling between received opinion (received, mostly, from his hero, Donald Davie), and ill-balanced subjectivity. Admittedly, Johnson himself was unreliable, but with him we are usually more interested in the judge than we are in those he’s judging. Johnson is a companion we want to see more of; he’s crusty and he makes ...”

“... What sort of a poet is Donald Davie? The factual answer, as with all poets, is to be found only in a volume such as the Collected Poems which he now lays before the public, but Davie himself appears to have worried more than most practitioners about what kind of poetry he was writing and – if one can put it that way – about the politics of style ...”

“... called “Rock-Drill”, and the inauguration of the next, called “Thrones”.’ This is Donald Davie in his introduction to Studies in Ezra Pound, offered as Volume IV of his Collected Works, and including the whole of Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964), followed by a single essay from 1972, then ‘Six Notes on Ezra Pound’ from Trying to ...”

“... Donald Davie’s critical arguments are often happily reminiscential, and his reminiscences are often happily argumentative, so the difference in kind between these two admirable books doesn’t make for any great difference of temper. The critical essays which make up Dissentient Voice: Enlightenment and Christian Dissent are an act of making good; they fulfil the promise and they repair the deficiencies of Davie’s earlier book on Dissent and culture, A Gathered Church ...”

“... be sad? Should we be bothered? Writing in the LRB just over twenty years ago, the near-omniscient Donald Davie pre-empted these questions and delivered a cruel judgment. Davie was reviewing Enright’s Collected Poems, and was both pertinent and impertinent in his comments, a combination characteristic both of petty ...”

“... Exeter and a wry postcard, long ago, from Stanford, as well as more substantial talks. He was Donald Davie, who was born in Barnsley in 1922 and died in Devon last autumn, a precise and passionate poet and critic, the Empson or the Eliot of his generation. Or rather, he would have been the Empson or Eliot of his generation, if his generation had not ...”

“... said’. Like time, it collaborates only with silence, always invoked in Larkin’s poetic medium. Donald Davie has an expressive metaphor for the other kind of poetry, in a poem aptly entitled ‘Ars Poetica’: Walk quietly around in A space cleared for the purpose. Most poems, or the best, Describe their own birth, and this Is what they are – a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... One of the finest things in Donald Davie’s Under Briggflatts is a sustained, learned and densely implicative comparison of two poems about horses: Edwin Muir’s well-known, post-Apocalypse poem ‘The Horses’ and Austin Clarke’s much less familiar ‘Forget me not’, a poem written out of Clarke’s angry response to the Irish trade in horse meat in the 1950s ...”

“... By one of those coincidences which one is minded mindlessly to call ironical, both arms of Donald Davie’s Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric are also embraced in Enright’s book. Enright has a section on ‘Milosz and the Case Against’, a respectful wary circling which becomes incautious only at the moment when, with rhetorical ...”

“... reminiscence. A vivid presence in Dublin in the 1950s was the ‘morally intimidating’ Donald Davie, then a fellow at Trinity College, where Donoghue would drop in on him to discuss modern poetry. ‘He used the word “infidel”,’ Donoghue remembers, ‘more freely and more deliberately than I supposed it had ever been used since the 17th ...”

“... experts in consciousness who have got to know the hard way where the limits of their theories lie. Donald Davie’s new sequence of poems, ‘Three for Water-Music’ (which fills the first third of his Carcanet paperback), refers not only to pleasant 18th-century entertainments by water, but to something like Yeats’s ‘words for music, perhaps’: or ...”

“... The first poem by Donald Justice I ever read was the much anthologised sestina, ‘Here in Katmandu’: We have climbed the mountain, There’s nothing more to do ... It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, a beautiful and mysterious object, resonant and yet resistant to paraphrase. It might be said that it is a poem of regret for the death of idealism, a poem about coming to terms with quotidian reality, and, therefore, in some sense about ‘the way we live now ...”

“... negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix’ positively bounced with energy when put beside Donald Davie sitting wrapped in his overcoat beside the fire saying Heigh-ho on a winter afternoon. It was possible then to see Ginsberg, Kerouac and their friends as anarchists articulating and exemplifying a morality that flouted the values of liberal ...”

“... and this is because there is in the British literary climate something of that ‘philistinism’ Donald Davie says was characteristic of the Movement: ‘We would not entertain for a moment the idea that poetry could be, in some degree, or from some points of view, a self-justifying activity.’ Why should it be that, insofar as it’s possible to ...”