Older Masters
Essays and Reflections on English and American Literature
Donald Davie is a poet-critic: his admirable essays are free of jargon, full of the clarity and insight of a major practitioner of the poetic art. His writing is in every sense refreshing: a pleasure to read and an inspiration to re-read the writers he considers, who here include, Ralegh, Shakespeare, Milton, Edward Taylor, Isaac Watts, Dryden, Berkeley, Pope, Wesley, Smart, Cowper, Goldsmith, Dr Johnson, Wordsworth, Scott, Keats and Landor as well as Chaucer and Browning. What gives this book unity is style, a coherence of concerns and an insistence on revaluing certain writers – including Scott and Goldsmith and the great hymn writers – who have fallen out of fashion.
About the Author
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" (1989), "Slavic Excursions" (1990), "Studies in Ezra Pound" (1991), "Older Masters" (1992), "Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy" (1995) and "Poems and Melodramas" (1996). "Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy" (one volume) are also available from Carcanet.
