Author Description

Of Baptist parentage, Donald Davie was, to quote from an essay written in his fifties, “an Englishman bred... near to the heart of English Dissenting Protestantism.” A considerable part of his critical writing is devoted to a defense of the conservative, orthodox, dissenting tradition—Baptist, Congregationalist, and Presbyterian—which he considers to be—at least in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—rational, intellectual, and enlightened. While in Dublin he produced Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), which reveals his serious interest in the technical excellence of poetry and in the moral and social implications of its subject matter, an interest he was to exhibit for the next thirty years in both his creative and his critical work. To abandon logical syntax, he states, “is to throw away a tradition central to human thought.” In Purity of Diction in English Verse Davie is chiefly concerned with literature prior to the twentieth century, but its principles regarding diction and syntax have a bearing on Davie’s own poetry and on the poetry of a number of his contemporaries, a group of like-minded poets in the 1950s which became known as The Movement. The Movement was, among other things, a sharp break with imagism and symbolism as they appear in the poetry of Pound and Eliot. Davie shared with The Movement what he called “an angry reaction from the tawdry amoralism which had destroyed Dylan Thomas,” and he mentions his indifference at that time to any poem which cannot be shown to be moral.