W.H. Davies and Modern Poetry

It is now nearly one hundred and fifty years since the birth of W.H. Davies (1871-1940), one of the most popular poets of his time (with twenty collections of poetry) but now rather ignored. Studying the reasons for this fall from favour casts a sharp light on the development of poetry in the twentieth century and the state of poetry today.

Leaving aside the fact that Davies wrote too much, although trying to limit his output would have been like attempting to stop an ever-flowing spring, his ‘fidelity to personal experience’ (as Jonathan Barker says in his introduction to the 1985 OUP Selected Poems) has made him an easy target for intellectual snobbery. It was Davies’s misfortune that his later years coincided with a revolution in poetry which attached more importance to an intellectual approach in writing poetry. This is why he did not feature in Michael Robert’s Faber Book of Modern Verse (published in 1936), which was only interested in including poems which ‘add to the resources of poetry’ and ‘be likely to influence the future development of poetry and language.’ It was also Davies’s misfortune to be writing poetry at a time when the English Language and Literature Departments at Oxford and Cambridge had only recently come into being and were under a certain amount of pressure from the older disciplines (which had been in existence for centuries) to justify their inclusion in a university curriculum. This they did by embracing a more scientific approach to English Literature, especially in the field of literary criticism. The instigators of this new discipline (F.R. Leavis, William Empson, I.A. Richards) and their journals like Scrutiny became as well known as the poets they were evaluating and any poet not requiring studious interpretation would tend to be disregarded. Nor did it help Davies’s standing in academia that he had written a prose best-seller, The Autobiography of a Super Tramp, which went through many editions.

Perhaps the greatest setback to Davies’s later reputation was that the whole climate of poetry writing, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, was heavily influenced by T.S.Eliot’s famous comment that ‘Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult’ – a sentiment that could not have been more different from Davies’s own compositions which took their subject matter from everyday incidents and experiences. It is true that with such a large output of poems (over seven hundred), some of them are no more than ‘winsome warblings’ as The Cambridge History of English Literature condescendingly described them. But the best, especially the lyrics, are worthy of comparison with any age and conform with Palgrave’s famous definition of lyrical poetry as ‘turning on some single thought, feeling or situation’. Such poems as ‘The Bust’, ‘All in June’, ‘Her Merriment’, ‘Love Lights his Fire’, ‘True or Fickle’, ‘Beauty and Brains’ illustrate Davies’s ability to elevate simple incidents or thoughts into memorable lyrics, helped by his mastery of the traditional skills of poetry (rhyme, metre, verse form).

It would be unfair to Davies, however, to draw attention only to his wellknown lyrics. Living for much of his early life amongst tramps and downand-outs gave him a pitch perfect ear for their language and lives. Such poems as ‘Saints and Lodgers’, ‘Scotty Bill’, ‘Scotty’s Luck’, ‘The Sailor to his Parrot’ have an authenticity that make T.S.Eliot’s attempts to catch the vernacular in the second part of ‘The Waste Land’ seem excruciatingly embarrassing in comparison (‘Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou … Ta ta. Goonight, etc.) On a more serious note, Davies’s ‘The Hospital Waiting Room’ is as sharp a piece of social commentary as can be found in any poet’s work. The most common theme in Davies’ poetry is undoubtedly his love for the countryside and animals informed by his own experiences and observations. Suffering in animals affected him deeply as in his poem about the snared rabbit, entitled simply ‘The Rabbit.’ In ‘Sheep’, he describes one of his working passages on a ship transporting sheep from America to England. The last two verses depict their predicament:

The first night we were out at sea Those sheep were quiet in their mind;