Donald Davie

Donald Alfred Davie (17 July 1922 – 18 September 1995) was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.

Davie was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England, a son of Baptist parents. He began his education at Barnsley Hogate Grammar School, and he later attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge. His studies there were interrupted by service during the war in the Royal Navy in Arctic Russia, where he taught himself the language. In the last year of the war, in Devon, he married Doreen John. After returning to Cambridge, he continued his studies and received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. He returned to Cambridge in 1958, and in 1964 was made the first Professor of English at the new University of Essex. He taught English at the University of Essex from 1964 until 1968, when he moved to Stanford University, where he succeeded Yvor Winters. In 1978, he relocated to Vanderbilt University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988.

He often wrote on the technique of poetry, both in books such as Purity of Diction in English Verse, and in smaller articles such as 'Some Notes on Rhythm in Verse'. Davie's criticism and poetry are both characterized by his interest in modernist and pre-modernist techniques. 'Davie claimed ‘there is no necessary connection between the poetic vocation on the one hand, and on the other exhibitionism, egoism, and licence'. He writes eloquently and sympathetically about British modernist poetry in Under Briggflatts, while in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry he defends a pre-modernist verse tradition. Much of Davie's poetry has been compared to that of the traditionalist Philip Larkin, but other works are more influenced by Ezra Pound. He is featured in the Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse (1980).

Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue described Davie's poetry as "an enforced choice between masturbation and happily wedded love" bereft of drama.

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