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Two Ways Out of Whitman: American Essays

Donald Davie

Cover Picture of Two Ways Out of Whitman: American Essays
Categories: American
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (280 pages)
(Pub. Jun 2000)
9781857544602
Out of Stock
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  • Thew and sinew, as well as head and shoulders above anybody else from the post-Eliot and post-Empson generation, Davie is the best of our poet-critics. The scale and range of Davie's accomplishments as critic, as poet (Marvell's profound fluency, Pasternak's limpidity, Pound's audacity, Tennyson's epistolary ease, all bearing fruit, honestly grafted), and as poet-critic or (proud humility) 'practitioner': he has not had a rival.

    Christopher Ricks

     This new collection of essays on American poetry by Donald Davie (1922-1995) displays again 'the scale and range' of one of the great 'understanders' of poetry of our century, here fulfilling his chosen role as bridge-builder between poets, poetries and cultures.

    Something distinctively American begins with Whitman, and Davie takes his bearings from the nineteenth-century writer whose long shadow fell so decisively on the Modernists and their successors. It is the radical difference of Whitman's approach, his copiousness, his opened forms, that any reader of modern American poetry must come to terms with. The earliest essay in this book was published in 1954, the latest in 1991: four decades' engagement with American poetry, with changes in perspective which illuminate his subjects and the developing concerns of the critic.

    Readers come to share his enthusiasms, engage with his critical strictures, take pleasure and learn from the dialogue he invites. Whether he is studying in depth a poem by Wallace Stevens, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Lowell or Robert Pinsky, or evoking the world of Yvor Winters, or exploring the work of those 'Black Mountain' poets (Ed Dorn and Charles Olson) whom he unfashionably commended to English readers, or raising fundamental questions about the place of William Carlos Williams in the American canon, he is invariably alert, independent-minded and plain spoken, an incomparable guide, a sharer of learning and - here is his bias - moral wisdom.

    The photographer DOREEN DAVIE, the poet's widow, includes many celebrated essays along with uncollected material, including work held at the Beinecke Library at Yale, where the largest collection of Donald Davie's manuscripts is held.
    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
    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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