Rights and Wrongs
John Davidson: A Selection of his Poems. Edited by Maurice Lindsay. (Hutchinson, 25s.)
NEVER mind other considerations, it is interest- ing to get a straight look at the work of a poet who put in his debt two such different writers, and persons, as T. S. Eliot and Hugh MacDiar- mid. Maurice Lindsay has taken the chance given by the expiration of copyright and the cranky clause in Davidson's Will that is tied to it to defer re-publication until now. Apart from the editor's own first-rate introduction—it'S interest- ing, informative and nicely balances enthusiasin for its subject with a refusal to inflate his worth —there is a preface by Eliot and an essay by MacDiarmid.
Davidson—he was born in 1857—was, for a Nineties poet, a very odd bird, whose flight was all the more erratic because his Left wing was stronger than his Right. What I mean is that he had new and dangerously `unpoetic' things to say and only a tatty, established vocabulary to say them in. The quarrel between the matter and the manner flawed, almost fatally, nearly all that he wrote-1 would say all that he wrote in blank verse, and there is plenty of it. He needed a rhythm with a bit of rumty-tumty in it, for his intellectual fibre was coarse but tough, and its utterance, when it steers clear of commonplaces. is more likely to be idiosyncratically extravagant than subtle.
He was aware of this quarrel and tried hard to master a colloquial use of language which could say in working clothes or even rags what could not be said in singing robes—and sometimes he achieved this. That is why he was important to Eliot in his 'formative years.' Davidson's collo-
quial idiom at its best and his interest in the dingier reaches of the Titanies and the more squalid aspects of London life prepared him, as he says. 'for initiation into the work of some of the French symbolists, such as Laforgue. .
Is it possible to imagine MacDiarmid's eyes lighting up when he reads that cowslips hoard Their virgin gold in lucent chalices?
What interests him in Davidson is 'the espousal of the underdog, anti-religion, materialism, Rabelaisian wit, invective' and Davidson's con- viction that 'the head, as of yore, and not the heart, will be the source of the poetical passion.' MacDiarmid shares with him, too, a sympathetic understanding of the individual, especially the underprivileged, and a tendency to make large prophetic statements about holus-bolus Man—as Davidson became obsessed with his notion of Man as the Universe made Conscious.
In the end, I suppose, both his interest and his value lie in his enlarging of the range of the Poetry of his day by loosening the dead grasp of 'poetic diction' and of the 'poetic' subject, by writing on urban themes and introducing savage social comment, by refusing to exclude scientific information from the matter of poetry and by writing a handful of poems which will remain fresh to the reader through their masculine directness and their courageous insistence that the world is a place where suffering is not a thing to sigh about to the twangling of lutes, and where, if there are wrongs, there are ways of righting them. His robustness is admirable:
I step into my heart and there 1 meet A god-almighty devil singing small, Who would like to shout and whistle in the
street And squelch th'e passers flat against the wall;
If the whole world was a cake he had the
power to take,
He would take it, ask for more, and eat it all.
NORMAN maccAIG
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