Modernist Essays

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.