“... as the pre-eminent American poet born in the 20th century, although Cox later changed his mind. Donald Davie, if not quite so enthusiastic, admired Zukofsky’s shorter poems, their music and their 17th-century echoes, of Charles Sedley especially, but also noted Zukofsky’s debt to Williams and Pound, particularly Pound. Zukofsky didn’t discount ...”

“... is the more corrosive, knowledge or benightedness? ‘Enormities should not be scrutinised,’ Donald Davie wrote, eight years after the end of the Second World War, ‘The queasy Levite need not be ashamed/To have no stomach for atrocities./We brook them better once they have been named.’ His logic-chopping looks perverse, sixty years on. Whether ...”

“... It is Waverley itself which defines the kind of success gained here, for it is Waverley which Donald Davie celebrated in these terms in The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott: ‘The hero in the lost-father fable has to be what Scott and the others have made him – wavering (there is a sort of pun with “Waverley”), inconstant, mediocre, weak. How else ...”

“... the line of great dead critics – Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Trilling and Donald Davie. If, as I believe, this volume does add up to a book, in fact a considerable one, it is artfully shaped as a study of bereavement and of commemoration – not least, as a tribute paid by one of the living to great artists. An essay on Marlowe ...”

“... whether he was up to the job, did he think the job was up to much? His later work is full of what Donald Davie, thinking of Larkin, called ‘diminished expectations’. ‘No world/wears as well as it should,’ Auden writes. Love is ‘far too/Tattered a word’ to describe a casual but agreeable affair. Minor ailments warn against ‘the flashy ...”

“... by the poet’s enthusiastic disciples? And this scepticism soon led to more serious charges. Donald Davie was one critic who insisted that Eliot, not only in the early poems but just as dangerously in Four Quartets, had turned English poetry off its proper course. The debate continues. Eliot’s stock seems at present rather low. The second ...”

“... you, they, are … merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind.’ Donald Davie once took Shelley to task for his ‘loose use’ of pronouns, which showed, Davie thought, a lack of discipline and probably suspect moral hygiene; but the tangles of such moments are not really a mark of ...”

“... love stories, but Lochhead does seem most inventive when she is (and is on the) offensive. Donald Davie (LRB, Vol. 6, No 11), seeking a contrast to the knotted texture of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry, has used the notion of a poetry that is ‘ventilated’, a poetry that lets us hear the natural speaking voice. This aptly characterises Lochhead’s ...”

“... is veering in just the opposite direction – away from formalism and explication de texte. Donald Davie declares that ‘criticism as an institution does not, and never did exist,’ thereby establishing his claim to being further out of touch with reality than anyone else in this volume. Davie means to say, of ...”

“... an amazing knowledge of wildlife, ‘though he is a bit of an old sod.’He is more critical of Donald Davie, saying in a sympathetic letter to John Montague apropos of a bad review that Davie is a ‘grotesquely shrunken silly imitator of Pound’, the receptacle of every other critic’s ‘dud cartridges & empty ...”

“... Harriet Guest’s starting-point is Donald Davie’s suggestion in 1958 that Christopher Smart might be considered ‘the greatest poet between Pope and Wordsworth’. Her intelligent and carefully argued book does not deliver quite the far-reaching reassessment of Smart’s status Davie must have had in mind ...”

“... vertebrated by a miniature anthology of elegant extracts from ‘our poet-critics’, Dryden to Donald Davie. Both essays substitute bravura appreciations for the comfortable tautologies which padded out Arthur Quiller-Couch’s preface to the first Oxford Book (‘the best is the best’). But in neither does Ricks find time to explain why Derek ...”

“... and England for the first time plays in modernist colours alongside Ireland and the United States. Donald Davie wrote that Bunting was ‘very important in the literary history of the present century as just about the only accredited British member of the Anglo-American poetic avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s’. Yes, he holds the century together, but ...”

“... in English poetry, we are often asked to admire the agonised perfectionism of a Geoffrey Hill or a Donald Davie, with its inbuilt grunts of effort, it is worth considering the perfection, tout simple, of Elizabeth Bishop. ‘Why had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way before?’ she asked herself on first reading Marianne ...”

“... The Sue Lenier episode in Cambridge finds him poking gentle fun at love-struck dons where Donald Davie thought it necessary to call up the heavy moral artillery. Soon after comes a couplet which would fit into a poem by Pope: The hoses gush, the truncheons rise and fall And where a thousand marched, a hundred crawl. At the end there are two ...”