“... constraints, to emerge. But one can’t generalise. Some émigrés are obsessed by the fatherland: Donald Davie goes transatlantic and promptly writes The Shires. Others adapt without fuss: Prince Charles, when traversing North America last year, announced his allegiance to the Reflective Sublime. ‘I rather feel,’ he declared, ‘that deep in the soul ...”

“... much part of the movement as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley or Kenneth Koch. With his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English conservative poet-critic, appeared to have capitulated to ‘American’ Modernism, just as the more recent poems of Charles Tomlinson seemed touched by the dotty magniloquence of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective ...”

“... runs through Sons of Ezra, which has pieces by a range of poets from grand old men (Morgan, Donald Davie) to established talents in mid-career (Charles Tomlinson, Douglas Dunn) to new Best of Young British megastars (W.N. Herbert, Robert Crawford). But the fact relevant to Pound’s current standing is the one in Michael Alexander and James ...”

“... poems; only Yeats and Hardy had significantly more. True, Larkin’s anthology was denounced by Donald Davie and others as a counterblast against Modernism. But it can’t be denied that Sassoon’s war poems share with Kipling’s the quality of being conspicuously memorable: the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations includes a dozen of them, mostly ...”

“... US and Canada were marked by depression and drunken bad behaviour. Graham’s asceticism and what Donald Davie called ‘the hieratic solemnity’ with which he took his own poetic vocation could be both romantic and manipulative. The editors of these letters tell us that when Graham moved from Gurnard’s Head in 1962, he simply walked out of the ...”

“... in placing Unitarianism within a wider tradition of dissenting Christianity; but in truth, as Donald Davie robustly maintained in A Gathered Church (1978), it hardly does justice to the enormous heterodoxy of Unitarianism to think of it as a form of Christianity at all. Certainly Coleridge came to think in that way. According to a story recorded by ...”

“... Life?’Admittedly, the gamesome poet is often a rather ponderous creature (‘Auden Ludens’, as Donald Davie pointed out, was often ‘Auden in short pants, acting the little horror’). But his vision of other people playing rarely feels actorly, and it takes us close to the centre of what art meant for him. In a lecture on ‘Poetry and ...”

“... feel the same; old women love Johnny Cash; and young men love him too. Even Nick Tosches – the Donald Davie of rock criticism – likes him, at least a little bit. Walk the Line is probably the only film that both I and my wife, my mother-in-law, my sister, my son, and the entire population of Camden Town and Middle America have all been united in ...”

“... They have risen since then. It is a great story, featuring some rum characters. Donald Read is an emeritus professor of modern English history at the University of Kent. This is an authorised account, commissioned and copyrighted by Reuters, but ‘the text has been prepared with complete independence.’ The lists of acknowledgments are ...”

“... that will give you all the hell you could want.‘Horror starts, like charity, at home,’ as Donald Davie put it, and the phrase could stand as epigraph to much of Waugh, especially his masterpiece of tangled modernism and barbarity, A Handful of Dust (1934). This time the protagonist is Basil’s anti-type, someone who is doomed from the ...”

“... was collected the same year in Determinations, Leavis’s first selection from the periodical. (Donald Davie described it in the LRB of 21 March 1991 as ‘one of the Leavisite demolition-jobs that truly cleared a space, and let the air in, for a more than academic public’.)Wilson doesn’t tell us in any detail what Thompson said, but ‘Our Debt to ...”

“... not to theory but to principles that they decline to pursue things through volumes. The work of Donald Davie, for instance (the best critic of the post Eliot-Leavis-Empson world), neither practises nor advocates literary theory; its hard thinking is resolutely unelaborated beyond the exposition and application of principles. Hartman praises highly ...”

“... his devotion to Reznikoff’s work attests. He tried to tackle these questions in a long letter to Donald Davie in 1972: ‘Several million Zionists wish to tell me that, being Jewish, I am not quite American and that being not quite Jewish – with two passionately assimilationist generations behind me – I am not quite either/ about which I sometimes ...”

“... when ‘the Movement’ was first identified, a group of writers that included Amis, Larkin, Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and others. As J.D. Scott put it in the baptismal piece in the Spectator, ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible.’ Amis in particular ...”

“... institutionalisation, became a haven for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything else. As Donald Davie pointed out some years ago, many of them didn’t like, or had no interest in, what they were supposed to teach and had to find something other than reading books to occupy their considerable supplies of energy and time. This is the result of a ...”