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Modernist Essays

Donald Davie

Edited by Clive Wilmer

Cover Picture of Modernist Essays
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (244 pages)
(Pub. Mar 2004)
9781857546491
Out of Stock
Digital access available through Exact Editions
  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Donald Davie mapped some of the most dependable critical routes into the heart Modernism - American, English, Irish and Continental. This book includes his most important essays on the subject, starting with his exemplary definition of Modernism in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum (1957) and following on with essays from five decades, about Eliot, Yeats and Pound, and about poetry and music, poetry and fiction. Taken together these essays trace a life-long engagement, sometimes against the grain, with some of the most challenging and rewarding works of the twentieth century. Davie reads with intense intelligence and feeling; at no point is a poet or a poem in danger of becoming grist for a merely academic mill.
    Donald Davie
    Born in Barnsley in 1922, Donald Davie served in the Navy and studied at Cambridge, becoming Professor of English at Essex, and later at Stanford and Vanderbilt. In 1988 he returned to England where he died in 1995. Carcanet's uniform Collected Works of Donald Davie includes Collected Poems (1990), Under Briggflatts ... read more
    Clive Wilmer
    ... read more
    Praise for Donald Davie 'From the publication of his debut collection of poems in 1955 until his passing in 1995, Donald Davie enjoyed a doubly excellent reputation as a critic and a poet... Sinéad Morrissey's Selected Poems gives an admirably rounded picture of his work and guides the reader through the editor's well-judged inclusions with a succinct introduction.'
    N.S. Thompson, The TLS
    'This is very unusual, essential and distinctive poetry of a kind we so often don't see. Davie had a well developed sense of his own outlook and it does come through in quite complex and multifaceted ways.'
    Clark Allison, Stride Magazine
    'This is a sampler of one of the major poets of the last generation that has been assembled by leaning into the proclivities of one of the major poets of our own... if you have read none of Davie's poetry before, you have a small, perfectly formed, ever-expanding universe to explore.'
    Rory Waterman, The Friday Poem

    'This is an accessible exploration of Davie's work. And it makes me want to read more, so this taster selection clearly works. It is an important reminder of the great writer he was, and how relevant he still is, nearly thirty years after his death. Morrissey's introduction is clear-eyed and intelligent, a perfect primer'
    James Nash, Everybody's Reviewing
    'He has drawn a map of modernism, starting with Hardy and Pound, that remains one of the definitive outlines of twentieth-century experiment in form and language. The mapmaker, in this case,is a notable locus on the map.'
    Helen Vendler
    `These poems thrive on the restless energy that drives their author on from form to form and place to place. Few poets are more likely than Davie to persuade new readers that poetry can still be a matter of concern and pleasure.'
    Martin Dodsworth, The Guardian
    'In his criticism, he has drawn a map of modernism, starting with Hardy and Pound, that remains one of the definitive outlines of twentieth-century experiment in form and language.'
    Helen Vendler
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