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“... chat shows and Sunday papers. Her canny male poet counterparts, such as Larkin, or Amis, or Donald Davie, had gone on to enjoy lucrative careers – making money out of academic jobs or film deals as well as writing poetry. They were celebrities of a kind. Sylvia Plath became a celebrity, and has remained one. Elizabeth Jennings, like her ...”

“... sound like lyrics? The dons are punished for their dereliction With dour gibes from the joyless Donald Davie Who demonstrates at length Sue’s vaunted diction Tastes thin compared with dehydrated gravy, While as for her alleged powers of depiction ... The dons must feel they’ve been shelled by the Navy. He calls them symptoms of a deep malaise As ...”

“... fury of 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 ...”

“... also (and strangely, considering his origins in the neo-Augustan ‘Movement’ of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound ...”

“... reactions in Eliot which are not patently any such thing. To say this, is to agree restively with Donald Davie, who has praised Ackroyd’s book for demonstrating Eliot’s essential commonplaceness. To Davie, though, this makes the book valuable as the exposure of something lamentable, whereas others of us may judge ...”

“... Auden never again wrote as well in America as he had written in England in the wretched Thirties. Donald Davie hasn’t wanted to come out to play with the ludic Auden of The Shield of Achilles: ‘The form of the Bucolics – improvisation turned inside out – was a good idea, but it let him in for the other thing he has to guard against, pirouetting ...”

“... of lyric poetry even when some of them, as in the case of Charles Simic’s jagged narratives or Donald Davie’s complaints, refuse the lyric. In her Introduction to Soul Says, she celebrates the lyric as a kind of charmed quarantine. It is a place where ‘the details associated with a socially specified self’ are stripped away. The ‘all-purpose ...”

“... essays on Bunting. Remarkably, there has never been a collection of Cox’s essays published. Donald Davie addressed the neglect of both the poet and essayist in his collection Under Briggflatts. He traces the failure of any UK publisher to collect Cox’s criticism to his ‘fierce repudiation of the well-regarded Geoffrey Hill’. On Bunting, it is ...”

“... have come more frequently. Michael Schmidt, his colleague on PN Review, has promoted his work; and Donald Davie, in one of those hot flushes that make his criticism so unpredictable and exciting, has declared Sisson’s ‘The Usk’ to be ‘one of the great poems of our time’. Sisson’s critical writing is intelligent, sharp, individual and ...”

“... were pronounced. Harold Cohen was ‘never to be mentioned again. He is an ignorant person’, Donald Davie was a ‘wretch’, and R.B. Kitaj ‘one of the very worst painters of the century’. When words were insufficient, Finlay’s indignation broke out in truncated sound poems (‘Agh, agh, yah, boo, ach, och, yugh, pugh, poo, pshaw and dash ...”

“... this Bitch burn at my deliverance in the furnace of my joyful cremation. We were fortunate that Donald Davie, setting up an English Department at the University of Essex in 1965, invited Dorn to cross the Atlantic as a Fulbright lecturer. This was a pivotal episode for Dorn and for the mass of younger English poets who had heard rumours of Black ...”

“... in its bleak, social realist aspect. In a review of Fisher’s 1968 Collected from Fulcrum Press, Donald Davie found strong affinities between Fisher and Larkin, in particular the ‘piercing pathos’ and the way that Fisher restricts ‘himself as self-denyingly as Larkin to the urbanised and industrialised landscapes of modern England’. ...”

“... by swallowing a lying excuse of hers concerning a subversive brother. The poets Czeslaw Milosz and Donald Davie are bothered by the insufficiency and irresponsibility of the lyric genre – and their views are discussed in the next article in this issue. It could be felt that Kundera goes further, in denouncing the lyric, and fares worse. The lyricism ...”

“... 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 ...”