after reading the book. This man is so right that all the dull, the ugly, the
unnecessary things, the advertisements at the railway station and so on, disgusted
me as so many obstacles to the life which those verses seem to propose for me.^5
But such simplicity then chafed: ‘his range of ideas is limited’, wrote
Thomas in 1910 , ‘and he will always be more pleased than his readers
with variation upon ‘‘God made the country and man made the town’’ ’.
Attempting to explain (to himself, perhaps) how Davies can be simultaneously
so delightful and so irritating, Thomas then insists that in fact, Davies’s
weaknesses are ultimately reassuring, because they mean that ‘Mr Davies’s
good things come of just that inexplicable unconscious simplicity which used
to be called inspiration’.^6 In other words, Davies’s bad moments – his lack of
proportion – only confirm the true simplicity of his good poems.
A tacit but important shift of terms has taken place here. Simplicity is
no longer seen as an inevitable effect of the purity of the author’s
personality, because Davies writes bad poetry too. Rather, it depends on
the incongruity or disproportion between various elements in Davies’s
work, and it is more visible to the reader than the poet himself. In other
words, Davies is not simple because he writes about sheep and cows, but
because his lack of proportion, his blithe mixture of the inappropriate as
well as the inspired, indicates that his poetry’s beauty comes despite its
author’s intentions. This redefinition gives Thomas’s verdict a much
wider relevance than just to Davies, for it touches on one of the chief
problems with admiring simplicity, directness and all the other virtues of
immediacy, that at the same time they tend to leave the simple poet with
nothing to do.^7 Davies fascinated Thomas, the Georgians and the
Imagists, because they saw in him a living version of the unified, naı ̈ve
sensibility they longed for. By associating him with a child’s-eye vision,
Walter de la Mare paid Davies the highest compliment in his vocabulary:
‘His art is simply second nature. He delights and at the same time shames
his reader, who never in all his born days, or at any rate since he was a tiny
little boy, saw anything quite so sharply and only its beautiful self.’^8 And
Ezra Pound also admired Davies’s ‘fine sense and still finer simplicity’;
despite noting his lapses into sentiment and his tendency to ‘talk about
things quite as often as he presents them’ (‘presentation’ being a key Imagist
virtue), he then declared: ‘Compare it with verse of its own kind and you will
not find much to surpass it. Wordsworth, for instance, would have had a deal
of trouble trying to better it... there is a resonance and body of sound in
these verses of Davies which I think many vers-librists might envy.’^9
But if Thomas were right, and simplicity an effect of disproportion
rather than of purity of origin, then Davies’s simplicity would start to
130 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism