Every age has its signatures of change. The telephone, the turbine engine, the neural chip - these are visible and measurable. But this book is a timely reminder that there are other less visible, and yet deeply revealing examples of how societies shift and re-order themselves.
Donald Davie was a wayward, passionate, honourable, quirky, insistent critic. His love for poetry was intense. He brought unfashionable ethics to an old art. Conscience, anger, engagement - attributes not always associated with criticism - could shine out of his discussion of a single poem. He was a fine poet himself and his tastes were both interesting and unpredictable.
This book - in a handsome paper edition by Carcanet - is a reminder of Davie's gifts and, still more, of his generosities. As it stands, everything in this text is worth reading. But the sub-text - also worth reading - is less easy to get at. Put briefly it is this: in the 19th century Davie would have been a sage, a central voice, a collaborative figure, looking sideways to the social, educational and religious orders of the day, even as they looked back to him. In the 20th century Davie was both a truly valuable and a deeply isolated figure. What happened in between?
Maybe the answer can be partly anecdotal. I remember the first time Donald Davie's writing - as against his name - made a strong impression on me. It was the early 1970s: a time of received truths and often bland discussions about poetry. I found it hard to come across something which sounded authentic, still less connected and fiery. Then in 1973 Philip Larkin published his Twentieth Century Oxford Book of Modern Verse.
However wonderful a poet Larkin was - and he was - this book reflected his suspicions rather than his strengths. It put on display the wilful, cantankerous spirit of a man who believed that three P's had ruined the century - Picasso, Pound and Charlie Parker. He elevated the English Century and turned his back on modernist uproar. It was a blatant act of poetic reaction. And yet the anthology, by and large, was received with respectful double talk.
Suddenly, as if out of nowhere - was it in The Listener? - came Donald Davie's review. A passionate, affectionate denunciation of the book. Above all, a calling of Larkin to task for not taking seriously what an anthologist should most attend to: the tide-lines of the century. It was clear from the review that Davie was an ardent modernist and Larkin anything but. But that was not the main point. The main point was that Davie had a life-or-death, on-fire and loving attitude to poetry which seemed, even then, to quote one of his heroes Ezra Pound "out of key with his time ".
I never forgot the generosity of Davie's attack on Larkin. It was notable for its vigilance, its lack of mean-spiritedness. And for something else as well, which returns here to be the shaping spirit of this book: Davie was determined that neither national boundaries nor tribal faiths should halt a poetry-lover at some lesser frontier than their excitement about an individual poem. Despite the fact that he was British, his excitement about American poetry was immense. These are, as the title says, American essays.
Two Ways Out of Whitman is only in part about the differences between American and British poetry. It is even more - in a compressed version - the autobiography of this honest and brilliant voyager. In a graceful note at the start, Doreen Davie dates his interest in American poetry to the 1940s, and to Davie's discovery of Yvor Winters' In Defense of Reason.
Winters, like Davie - but unlike him, an American - was a luminous and wayward commentator on poetry. And at this juncture, the story grows familiar to me. I work at Stanford during the year, where both Winters and Davie worked, and where their memories are treasured. In fact, Davie credits Winters with teaching him metre. And in a splendid and characteristic passage, quoted by Doreen Davie, he adds: "The numbering of syllables - on the fingers if necessary - witnesses ultimately to a conviction that the mathematician's account of the cosmos, and the poet's, are not at odds".
In a further quotation of what Davie thought Winters had taught him the soul of this book is revealed: "He alone through his printed writings as well as his letters educated me as regards poetic rhythm and poetic metre . . . This will be thought a narrowly technical matter; but it is one of the peculiarities of poetry, as of the other fine arts, that what seem to be considerations merely of technique turn out to have far-reaching implications stretching even to one's sense of the cosmos, of its unity and its rationality."
A critic who made sense of the universe through poetic measure is rare at any time. Two Ways Out of Whitman shows that the chief by-product of that attitude, at least in this case, is an open-minded generosity. There are more than 30 essays here, covering a wide span of time and poetry from the 1950s to the 1980s. They are by no means strictly canonical. This is, by any standards, an original and maverick canon. The pieces range from detailed discussions of such figures as Lorine Neidecker and Edward Dorn - fine poets at an historic or aesthetic margin - to more general arguments about Pound or Whitman. The method is often too close for comfort - a sort of watchmaker's zeal with the word or the line. And yet it is impossible not to get drawn in, as with his wonderful opening lecture "The American Canon", originally delivered in Montana.
And now to the question I started with. Why should figures like Davie have seemed increasingly isolated, when in another age he might have been exactly the opposite? The answer has to be about society and its attitudes to the critic-sage. Davie began to write at a time when the academy was beginning to be constructed in its most monolithic post-war sense. Although he taught, and was deeply valued at places like Stanford, he was not a clubbable intelligence, any more than Winters. The truth is, that in this century there is far less comfort with the non-conformist conscience in the arts than there once was. And Davie is just that: the scourge and minister to the orthodox opinion and a reminder of the duties of the reader, as well as the writer. Davie died five years ago. This superb book shows how far his voice still reaches. And needs to.
Eavan Boland teaches at Stanford University in California. She is co-editor with Mark Strand of The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, which will be published next month