18
PARTISAN REVIEW
mean: Davie has never been able to think straight.
A
few weeks later I
received a letter from him that I could not bear to answer. Once, about
fifteen years later, I diffidently invited him to take part in a radio pro–
gram I was preparing for the BBC on
The Waste Land.
He accepted the
invitation, and performed trenchantly on the occasion, but our old
friendship was gone.
IV.
IN
Articulate Ellergy
(1955),
Da vie took up the issue of poetry-as-music.
He believed, with Fenollosa and Pound to sustain him, that the crucial
factor in poetry is syntax. Purity of diction is a major consideration, but
a difference of syntax is a more comprehensive difference because it
indicates the way a poet stands toward the world. Modern poetry
assumes, he argued-with Eliot chiefly in mind-"that syntax in poetry
is wholly different from syntax as understood by logicians and gram–
marians." Davie repudiated this assumption, and spoke up for logicians
and grammarians, but he had to admit-as Empson did-that good
poems had been achieved under its direction. He conceded that poetry–
as-music is not merely a modern aberration: it is close to what he called
"subjective syntax," which pleases "by the fidelity with which it follows
the 'form of thought' in the poet's mind." His main examples were
Coleridge's "Dejection" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison":
How can a bower of lime-trees be a prison? And even as
[Coleridge] begins to show how this can be, he proves that it can–
not be, since the imagination cannot be imprisoned and the poet
goes on to acknowledge, at the end of the poem, that the prison is
no prison, and the loss no loss. The syntax, continually finding new
stores of energy where it has been affirmed that no more is to be
found (the sentence, once the main verb has been introduced, seems
ready to draw
to
a close), mimes, acts out in its own developing
structure, the development of feeling behind it.
Syntax-as-music is like subjective syntax: it pleases "by the fidelity with
which it follows a 'form of thought' through the poet's mind
but with–
out defining that thought"
(Davie's italics).
In a chapter of
Articulate Energy,
Davie takes into consideration
Susanne K. Lange r's
Philosophy in a New Key.
He was impressed by
the book, and by Sir Herbert Read's claims for it. He quoted Langer's
