DENIS DONOGHUE
17
like clay in one's hands: it has no character, no rights, in itself. But
according to Davie, the carver feels that "the form he wants is already
present in the marble" and that it is his privilege "to make what is
already there reveal itself." Pound was a carver, as Augustan as Swift
and Pope. Poetry under the sign of carving "has to do with a reality
which is as fully and undeniably
out there,
as certainly other than us and
confronting us, as is the block of marble where it lies in the quarry
before the sculptor." In "Two Analogies for Poetry"-which he
regarded as his most far-reaching essay in those days-Davie urged
poets who engaged with the world through its natural and physical
forms to think of themselves as exploring "the same reality as the sci–
ences explore, but with different categories and different instruments."
When the reality to be engaged was metaphysical, such poets should
claim "to be exploring the same reality as religion or ontology." In the
same essay Davie attacked the assumption, which he ascribed to Sym–
bolism, that physical or metaphysical reality
out there
could be turned
into "a psychological reality
in here,
inside the artist's head." It is only
in Prufrock's mind that fog behaves as a cat behaves or that an evening
is like a patient etherized upon a table. Davie didn't agree that the poem
is justified to the extent to which it explores the peculiarities of
Prufrock's mind. Later, he presented the difference between Eliot and
Pound as a difference in their sense of language: "As compared with
Pound, Eliot presents himself as pre-eminently a rhetorician, a man who
serves language, who waits for language to present him with its revela–
tions; Pound by contrast would master language, instead of serving lan–
guage he would make it serve-it must serve the shining and sounding
world which continually throws up new forms which language must
strain itself to register."
I should not give the impression that in the shining and sounding city
of Dublin Davie merely kept on reciting the moral superiority of poetry–
as-carving over the immorality of poetry-as-modeling or poetry-as–
music. But he held to that position, as I recall in an argument with the
Australian poet and critic Vincent Buckley in Davy Byrne's public house.
Buckley wanted to talk about the ethics of fornication. Davie insisted on
talking about the obligations of poetry. He always had a moral princi–
ple by his side. But his literary judgments were not as settled as his
morality.
If
you compare his two books on Pound, you find that in one
of them he declared
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
a masterpiece; in the other,
a mess. Indeed, our friendship came to an end when I remarked, in a
review of the later book on Pound, that the relation between Davie's
mind and its contents had always been experimental. He took that to
