Finding the Poet

Literary history offers many stories of writers being ‘discovered’: Ford Madox Ford discovering ‘another genius’ in D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound fostering his fellow American T. S. Eliot, Teddy Roosevelt saving the career of E. A. Robinson by reviewing his book and finding him a sinecure in the New York Custom House. In a sense, discoveries of writers are no more real than discoveries of continents, since the writers and continents were already in place, fully alive by themselves. Discovery in this sense is that primal experience of reading on one's own, falling in love with a writer before that writer has been approved by others. We become fascinated by the hopefulness of careers rescued from obscurity, amazed that any writing of value survives beyond its original composition.

W. H. Davies is one of those writers requiring rescue and rediscovery. A minor poet and the author of an extraordinary memoir, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), Davies can seem trapped in the amber of another age, Britain before the First World War, a time of innocence or delusion, depending on your point of view. Whether Davies's poetry ever really transcended that intolerable innocence is not easily determined. His first self-published collection of verse, The Soul's Destroyer (1905), contains work of derivative enthusiasm alongside poems that touch reality freshly and acutely. However, one can learn a great deal about aesthetic values of our own and other generations by reading his work, and not least this first volume.

What is it that makes a modern poet like Eliot seem perennially fresh, if compromised by his prejudices, while a generous figure like Davies may have lost some of his bloom? Surely Davies wrote several poems with truth in them. But saying something true is not alone the stuff of literature that lasts – ‘news that stays news’, in Pound's words. The best poetry can be read both in and out of the context of its period, a form of expression that dawns on us like reality renewed. When read in extenso, Davies's verse, unlike his best prose, more often than not seems old news.