Under Briggflatts is the sixteenth volume of criticism by the English poet and essayist Donald Davie. Although the book announces itself as a history of British poetry from 1960 to 1988, it is nothing of the sort. The dates are only loosely observed: essays on Basil Bunting (1900-85), Edwin Muir (1887-1959), and Edward Thomas, who died in the First World War, jostle with articles on such contemporaries as Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, and C. H. Sisson. What’s more, many inferior writers are discussed, sometimes at length, while poets more deserving of attention—Craig Raine and Andrew Motion, for example—go unmentioned. All in all, Under Briggflatts amply confirms Davie’s reputation as one of our most eccentric critics.
Among the book’s other oddities is Davie’s inclination to assess poetry on the basis of its subject matter rather than on its literary excellence. Take, for example, one of the essays on Basil Bunting, a minor British disciple of Ezra Pound. (The “Briggflatts” of Davie’s book is a reference to Bunting’s long poem of that title, which, in Davie’s view, is a landmark of recent British poetry.) Davie, who has long been a champion of Pound and his followers, writes that “Bunting . . . would have us believe [that he] is like his American colleague George Oppen in wanting to make affirmations . . . only about things offered to his senses, and the patterns which such things make in his awareness of them.”
In Davie’s view, a similarly modest and
