With the Grain

Essays on Thomas Hardy and British Poetry

Davie Donald

In "Thomas Hardy and British Poetry" (1972) Donald David identified how deep and durable a mark the Dorset poet left on the English sensibility. Hardy's formal approach and his distinctive tonalities have – for better or worse – affected the choices of form, the kinds of irony and the contingencies that circumscribe English poetry. How the example of Hardy deflected the enabling force of Modernism is a fascinating theme.

Donald Davie returns to Hardy and his legacy in several major essays. The poet and critic Clive Wilmer presents "Thomas Hardy and British Poetry" along with writings which clarify the nature of Hardy's poetry and its impact, and explore some of the ways in which British writers have extended and eluded the potent ghost of Hardy's influence.

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.

Reviews

"In his criticism, he has drawn a map of modernism, starting with Hardy and Pound, that remains one of the definitive outlines of twentieth-century experiment in form and language" –
Helen Vendler

Back to the list of books