resemble its opposite, sophisticated modernist dissonance, since thanks to
Davies’s simple, unreflective refusal to sort his ideas out, the reader will
struggle to find a single unifying point of view lying behind them. For the
irony of admiring any poet’s naı ̈vely direct capacities is that the lack of
distance between the poet and the work means the poet cannot be a point
of reference to explain it, as Schiller had commented:
He flees the heart that seeks him, the need that would embrace him... The subject
matter takes complete possession of him; his heart does not lie like some cheap metal
right beneath the surface, but rather wants to be sought, like gold, in the depths. Like
the divinity behind the structure of the world, he stands behind his work. Thenaı ̈ve
poetis the work and the work is thenaı ̈ve poet. You have to be unworthy of the work or
not up to it or have already had your fill of it, to ask only aboutthe poet.^10
The naı ̈ve lack of any detached, reflective viewpoint, the utter identifica-
tion of the poet with the poem makes the sheer obviousness of Davies’s
poems quite impersonal – and not in the best sense, Eliot would say, but in
the sense sufficiently close to it to point up the difficulties ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’ had in reconciling a poetic designed to overcome rhet-
oric through self-sacrifice with a poetic which would simply make rhetoric
impossible because there was no actual self.^11 In fact, the contradictions of
simplicity, whereby the more directly the poet speaks, the more invisible or
untraceable he becomes, make Davies’s work a kind of test-case for the
whole question of sincerity, form and style among modernists and Geor-
gians, because its blankness suggests the price to be paid for achieving
complete directness. Whether Davies was quite as naı ̈ve as people wanted
him to be is another matter: he knew how much his simplicity depended on
a sentimental audience, and he found it in the Edwardian tramp-cult which
saw in his work a freedom from respectable life, and invited him to society
gatherings to discuss it. But after his death in 1940 Davies’s poetry was
largely forgotten until Philip Larkin drew attention to it in his search for an
alternative to the modernist tradition. Setting his work in just that context,
though, suggests a much closer involvement of modernist poetics with the
Georgian and Wordsworthian ones they resisted so vigorously.
reading daviesIn his review of the first anthology ofGeorgian Poetry, Thomas thought
that only de la Mare and Davies had penetrated far into the kingdom of
‘magic, rapture and beauty’ that all the other Georgians were labouring to
enter.^12 It is not difficult to see the relevance of those three criteria to de la
The simplicity of W. H. Davies 131