Donald Davie

Donald Davie (1922-1995), English poet, critic, and translator. Davie was born in Yorkshire, and educated at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he also took a doctorate; his studies were interrupted by World War II, and Davie served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve from 1941 to 1946. Subsequently, Davie held a number of lectureships and professorships, including posts at Trinity College, Dublin, Caius College, Cambridge, and the University of Essex.

Davie was taught by the influential literary critic F. R. Leavis at Cambridge, and his critical work Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952) shows his tutor's influence. The volume also expressed concerns which were visible in Davie's own poetry, and his first work, Brides of Reason (1955), established his temporary allegiance to The Movement, a loose grouping of poets that included Philip Larkin, D. J. Enright, and Thom Gunn. These poets had reacted against both Modernism and the highly rhetorical poetry of the 1940s by appealing for a sense of restraint, clarity of expression, and suspicion of romanticism.

Davie was subsequently to move further and further away from both the narrow critical standards of Leavis and what he saw as the provincialism and philistinism of the Movement poets in their early years. His concern with English traditions, and his Baptist upbringing, did not prevent him from writing with a vivid sense of place about European countries he had travelled in, nor from producing numerous translations of Eastern European poets, some of whom he championed and brought to the attention of a wider readership. Plainly written, philosophical, even moralistic, Davie's work is both conservative and dissenting; as he wrote in “Life Encompassed”:

Many of Davie's shorter poems are gathered together in Collected Poems 1950-1970 (1972) and Collected Poems 1970-1983 (1983). He also produced critical works on Ezra Pound and Thomas Hardy, as well as volumes on British, Russian, and Polish literature.