Donald Davie – författare

What is meant by `Christian' verse? What must there be in a passage of verse that gives us the right to call it `Christian'? These are the questions discussed in Professor Davie's illuminating introduction and answered implicitly on every page of his collection of over 260 poems.This well-loved anthology embraces everything from the Anglo-Saxon 'The Dream of the Rood' to the works of modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, Sir John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, and John Berryman. Australian and American poetry appears alongside English, Anglo-Irish, Scottish, and Anglo-Welsh verse, and the book also includes a selection of congregational hymns.

First published in 1978, this study considers the impact of dissenting voices upon literature, religion and politics in order to reassess the nonconformist contribution to English culture from the eighteenth century through to the twentieth. This historical survey takes into the account the contribution of a wealth of seminal literary figures such as the poets Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley and William Blake; and the novelists Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot, Mark Rutherford and D. H. Lawrence. However, far from consigning his study merely to literature, Davie also includes important orators like Robert Hall; scientists like Michael Farraday and Philip Gosse; political activists like Joseph Priestly, and soldiers like Orde Wingate. Unitarians, Sandemanians, Wesleyan Methodists and the Plymouth Brethren are considered, as well as the older denominations.

First published in 1961, this book examines a number of works popular in the Romantic period, during the heyday of Sir Walter Scott in the early part of the nineteenth century. Encompassing works by the likes of Alexander Pushkin, Sir Walter Scott, Adam Mickiewicz and James Fenimore Cooper, this is also a meditation on the nature of Romanticism and its enduring value, as expressed in the novel form. Donald Davie also considers the meaning and importance of ‘plot’ and of ‘realism’.

First published in 1961, this book examines a number of works popular in the Romantic period, during the heyday of Sir Walter Scott in the early part of the nineteenth century. Encompassing works by the likes of Alexander Pushkin, Sir Walter Scott, Adam Mickiewicz and James Fenimore Cooper, this is also a meditation on the nature of Romanticism and its enduring value, as expressed in the novel form. Donald Davie also considers the meaning and importance of ‘plot’ and of ‘realism’.

First published in 1978, this study considers the impact of dissenting voices upon literature, religion and politics in order to reassess the nonconformist contribution to English culture from the eighteenth century through to the twentieth. This historical survey takes into the account the contribution of a wealth of seminal literary figures such as the poets Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley and William Blake; and the novelists Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot, Mark Rutherford and D. H. Lawrence. However, far from consigning his study merely to literature, Davie also includes important orators like Robert Hall; scientists like Michael Farraday and Philip Gosse; political activists like Joseph Priestly, and soldiers like Orde Wingate. Unitarians, Sandemanians, Wesleyan Methodists and the Plymouth Brethren are considered, as well as the older denominations.

Donald Davie is the foremost literary critics of his generation and one of its leading poets. His career has been marked by a series of challenging critical interventions. The eighteenth century is the great age of the English hymn though these powerful and popular texts have been marginalized in the formation of the conventional literary canon. These are poems which have been put to the text of experience by a wider public than that generally envisaged by literary criticism, and have been kept alive by congregations in every generation. Davie's study of the eighteenth-century hymn and metrical psalm brings to light a body of literature forgotten as poetry: work by Charles Wesley and Christopher Smart, Isaac Watts and William Cowper, together with several poets unjustly neglected, such as the mysterious John Byron.

Because these poems do not idealize love and marriage, they may raise eyebrows as readers examine the various expressions through which British poet Donald Davie identifies the essence of true love. The poems' strength lies in their honesty and intimacy and in the openness to the pain and self-understanding that both ardor and conflict can produce. They reveal a marriage in which the partners know each other too well to be assuaged by a sentimental lyricism.