Davie claimed in 1977 that Briggflatts is ‘where poetry has got to, it is what English poets must assimilate and go on from'. Since the 1950s, Davie had engaged with home-grown, English traditions and foreign, typically American, models of poetry. His Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952) was seen as the Movement's unofficial manifesto and his poetry was represented in Robert Conquest's New Lines anthology (1956). The poet-critic's investment in the eighteenth century, with its privileging of craft and rationality, would appear to have made him a natural enemy of modernist experiment. Yet, even before the publication of Conquest's Movement anthology, he was arguing that ‘Pound has influenced [him] more deeply and more than any other poet of the present century.’ By the end of the 1950s, Davie the Movement insider was considering how the English had set about battening down their shutters. It had now become difficult

After the mystifications of the Yeats-Pound-Eliot line, the Bohemian excesses of Dylan Thomas and the neo-Apocalyptic poets of the 1940s, a period of retrenchment was taking place. Larkin's ‘Statement’ disparages the modernists’ ‘myth-kitt/ and welcomes a poetry unhindered by allusion. It is a call for a cleansing modesty and the paradigm suited a bankrupt country that was letting go of its imperial ambitions. Inevitably, this turning away from international modernism generated a curtailing Little-Englandism and an inward-looking poetic that appeared to be throwing out the baby with the proverbial bath water. If Movement poetry was wary of pretentiousness and ‘cultural window-dressing', it went about setting its house in order by imposing such stringent limitations that it became ‘painfully modest in its pretensions’ and ‘deliberately provincial in its scope’ and ‘marginal in its importance'.

Reviewing Charles Tomlinson's Seeing is Believing in 1959, Davie praises his former student for refusing ‘to join the silent conspiracy which now unites all the English poets from Robert Graves down to Philip Larkin […] the conspiracy to pretend that Eliot and Pound never happened'.