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 and original 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...

The poems gathered here were composed by Donald Davie for his wife Doreen, to whom he was married and devoted for fifty years. The earliest of them were copied out by hand and presented to Doreen as a tribute on the occasion of her 54th birthday, and this -garland- was then added to over the years. Of the 43 poems, ten are published here for the first time, two others in new versions. They span the five decades of the couple's marriage, and because of this portray an enduring but complex relationship as it changes over time.

To some readers the poems will seem unusual as love poems because...

Donald Davie is a poet of the English perspective refracted through historical meditation, essay-poem, love lyric, satire, translation (notably the Psalter), epistle, eclogue and other forms. His passion is for our common language, its registers and tonalities.

Two literary criticism pieces that have shaped approaches to teaching poetry since the 1950s are now available in one volume with a new foreword. Providing a brilliantly detailed analysis of the workings of English poetry, this collection focuses on the technical workings of poetic language, examining devices such as meter and diction. These explorations use examples from poets including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Eliot, and Yeats.

Donald Davie's major essays on British and American writers from Chaucer to Browning.

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...

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'.