'A Kind of Aesthetics'

Almost twenty years ago the late poet and Melville scholar Helen Pinkerton urged me to read Wisdom and Wilderness: the Achievement of Yvor Winters (1983) by the English-born poet Dick Davis. She had been a student of Winters at Stanford in the Forties and remained loyal to his work and memory. Helen judged Davis’ book the most reliable written on the too-often-forgotten poet-critic (admittedly, not a crowded field). Then I learned that Davis was a gifted poet and famed translator of Persian verse. 

Interviews with poets tend to be exercises in pablum and self-promotion, but Elijah Perseus Blumov’s with Davis at New Verse Review is a pleasing exception. Blumov describes Davis as “a true master of verse craft.” We learn his favorite poets are Chaucer, Hardy and Auden: “I like them because they are brilliant technicians.” About Winters he says:

 

“[T]he fact that you could write poetry in the plain style is something that I got from Winters. Also, the sense that—and this sounds trite and obvious but it’s not something that was talked about when I was young—that you can think in poetry. Winters is very keen on people thinking. He loves Fulke Greville, for example, who actually thinks as the verse goes along, and you can see him pondering and changing his mind. I wasn’t aware of that strand of poetry, and Winters’ work introduced me to the plain style, to thinking in verse, and also to taking poetry seriously.”

 

Davis befriended another former student of Winters, Edgar Bowers:

 

“His personality was quite mercurial in many ways. He was very funny when he disapproved of people, and he would say things like, ‘Oh, he couldn’t tell a good poem from a hole in the wall!’ I actually remember him saying that about someone. He would speak with utter contempt about people. He hated people who showed off and didn’t have anything to show off about—that really infuriated him.”

 

And here is Davis beginning with autobiography and turning quietly to philosophy:

 

“I was a very moralistic young man, a rather unpleasant young man, I think– always telling people how to live and what to do. I really dislike people who do that nowadays. Aesthetics and morality don’t seem to me to be opposites. Morality—this is going to sound hopelessly precious—but morality, in a way, is a kind of aesthetics. It’s an instinct for what is appropriate and right, which is what aesthetics is too. So I don’t see them as totally separate.”

 

Davis has written several poems about Edgar Bowers, including “Edgar,” which carries the dedication “(i.m. Edgar Bowers, 1924-2000)”: 

 

“A few things that recall you to me, Edgar:

 

“A stately ’80s Buick; hearing a car

Referred to by a coaxing soubriquet--

’ Now come on, Captain, don’t you let me down.’

French spoken in a conscious southern accent;

An idiom calqued and made ridiculous

(’Eh, mettons ce spectacle sur le chemin’).

’Silly,’ dismissive in its deep contempt,

’Oh he’s a silly; an amiable silly,

But still a silly.’ The words I first

Encountered in your captious conversations,

’Tad,’ ‘discombobulated,’ ’cattywampus.’

The usage that you gave me once for ’totaled’–

’Oh cruel fair, thy glance hath totaled me.’

 

Most recently, in Cleveland’s art museum,

The French Medieval Tapestries brought back

Your unabashed reaction to their beauty,

And how, for once, you’d stood there almost speechless,

Examining Time’s Triumph inch by inch,

Enraptured by its richness, by the young man

Proud in his paradisal place, until

You saw what his averted gaze avoided--

The old man, beaten, bent double by fate’s blows,

Driven from youth’s charmed, evanescent circle:

And how you’d wanted to be sure I’d seen him.”

 

To read Davis’ work find Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2017).