Search Results

“... briefly by an unregarded few. And so it comes about that the Victorians – Browning, no less than George Eliot – are back in favour, not just for their undemanding and verbally profligate forms but for their portentous preoccupation: how to lose religious faith and yet preserve all the psychological comforts which that faith had afforded. More than a ...”

“... history The Cantos are much concerned with – the transmission of cultural values (from Homer via George Chapman to John Keats). The error about Cortez doesn’t matter, not for the reason the Norton editors give or imply, but because it is an error in the history of European discovery and colonising of the New World – and that is not, except ...”

“... from the magnificent love-compliment, ‘Two Ways of It’, a poem which, in the manner of some of George Herbert, even as it denounces the hyperbolical achieves it. Such a sophisticated manoeuvre is highly rhetorical in a way not allowed for by Crozier when he denounces Larkin and Hughes and Heaney ‘as rhetoricians, in fact’. 1960 was late for such ...”

“... One of Donald Davie’s early poems, and one of his strongest, is ‘Pushkin: A Didactic Poem’, from Brides of Reason (1955). As in Davie’s ‘Dream Forest’, Pushkin is taken as a model, a poet Who recognised no checks Yet brooked them all – a mind Molten and thereby fluent, Unforced, easily strict ...”

“... New Apocalypse. As for the Movement, two of its original New Lines members, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie, went off in directions undreamed of by Robert Conquest and still largely ignored by contemporary British poetry. Looking a little further, we find that Gunn and Davie between them do something that has still not been ...”

“... Donald Davie has proposed that Eliot’s Quartets are in some sense a work of self-parody, with ‘The Dry Salvages’ in structure and style parodistic of the quartets that preceded it. This proposal took off from an idea of Hugh Kenner’s, and any theory with two such exceptionally able sponsors needs treating with respect ...”

“... stagnated. There had been a time when it was a party of ideas and ideals – owing more to Henry George than to Marx – but its leaders had long since ceased to believe in either the practicality or the desirability of socialism, and, depressed by the ease with which Menzies won successive elections, did not bother to search for anything to put in its ...”

“... the poet has a sure sense of when it is appropriate, when not. The influences – Hopkins in ‘George Chapman – The Iliad’, Edward Thomas in ‘On Foscombe Hill’ and ‘Up There’ and possibly ‘Imitation’, Jonson in ‘We Who Praise Poets’, Whitman and possibly D.H. Lawrence in ‘Felling a Tree’ – are discernible but never for ...”

“... and when they defer to or expatiate upon European theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin or George Steiner, it is easy to miss, as I think Christopher Reid did, the altogether un-European urgency of their concern. For them, translation, and the disputable possibility of it (at least as regards verse), is a matter neither academic nor narrowly ...”

“... cunt’, and so on. Less succinct salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie (‘droning out his tosh’), Ted Hughes (‘boring old monolith, no good at all – not a single solitary bit of good’) and Anthony Powell, aka ‘the horse-face dwarf’. There is even a ‘Hi, Ian’: he calls me ‘the Kerensky of poetry’. Not too ...”

“... poetic form and poetic inspiration work to search each other out. One of these poets was Donald Davie, the other Timothy Steele. Let me talk about Donald first. In the middle of my studies in Economics at Stanford University, I was given the chance to spend a year in the Creative Writing Program in the English Department. I was not at all convinced that ...”

“... appreciate, as his title promises, the creative writers Marlowe, Donne, Clarendon, Crabbe, Austen, George Eliot, Lowell and Hardy; the historian Clarendon, the philosopher Austin and the biographers Gaskell, Froude and Hallam Tennyson; and, throughout, the line of great dead critics – Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Trilling and Donald ...”

“... I, on January 30th of each year, and, on the other, on the side of liberty and against King George III in the Wilkes controversy ... he liked Lords but he is no snob; he liked women but not in the amorous way ... and he is merciful to all animals; finally in religion he loved the quiet way ... ’ This we discover at the end of the Introduction is how ...”

“... in the work which, more than any other book, provided the title-deeds of the cultural revival: George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect, published by Edinburgh University Press in 1961, was fallible as a history of Victorian Scottish universities, but an eloquent restatement of the deductive basis of the Scottish intellectual tradition assaulted by ...”

“... Ascherson and Tom Nairn – are very familiar to readers of this paper. Another, the economist George Kerevan, a former member of the International Marxist Group and then a Labour councillor, went on to become an influential nationalist commentator with fervently pro-market views. Bob Tait was the founding editor of the cultural magazine Scottish ...”