Purity of Diction in English Verse

Abstract

IN THE 1992 FOREWORD to the reissue of Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), Donald Davie wrote that he had been ‘vindicated’ in the aims that he had set himself in writing the book forty years earlier.1 But what were these aims? The book argued that poetry should be valued for its consistency of tone, its resistance to extravagant metaphor, its discipline in refusing to use words that would lead the poem to become uneven and self-indulgent. This recalls Samuel Johnson’s attack on metaphysical poetry for its wild conceits; indeed, Johnson is a presiding spirit in the book, though not one always invoked with unqualified approval, since Davie never quite shares Johnson’s definiteness of value judgements. Although his book is continually evaluative (in the manner of his ‘first teacher’ (p. x), F. R. Leavis), Davie does not argue that purity of diction is essential in poetry. Shakespeare and...