Modernist Essays: Yeats, Pound and Eliot

Description

Donald Davie mapped some of the most dependable critical routes into the heart Modernism - American, English, Irish and Continental. This book includes his most important essays on the subject, starting with his exemplary definition of Modernism in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum (1957) and following on with essays from five decades, about Eliot, Yeats and Pound, and about poetry and music, poetry and fiction. Taken together these essays trace a life-long engagement, sometimes against the grain, with some of the most challenging and rewarding works of the twentieth century. Davie reads with intense intelligence and feeling; at no point is a poet or a poem in danger of becoming grist for a merely academic mill.

Born in Barnsley, DONALD DAVIE (1922-1995) served in the Navy and studied at Cambridge, then became Professor of English at Essex, Stanford and Vanderbilt. Carcanet's uniform Collected Works of Donald Davie includes Under Briggflatts (1989), Slavic Excursions (1990), Studies in Ezra Pound (1991), Older Masters (1992) and Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy (1995). A definitive Collected Poems appeared in 2002, and other recent volumes include With the Grain: Essays on Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1998), Two Ways Out of Whitman: American Essays (2000) and A Travelling Man: Eighteenth-Century Bearings (2003).