british poetry in the age of modernism

makes Thomas and de la Mare’s admiration for him even more puzzling,
for such direct self-promotion is at odds with their own attempts at out-
manoeuvring their conscious and divided selves. De la Mare’s ideal poem
was the nursery rhyme because it brought its reader into the ‘selfless’
world of Mr Anon.^18 Thomas wrote in anguish to Eleanor Farjeon that
‘the central evil is self-consciousness’ in poetry.^19 But Davies has his place
within their pantheon because of the paradox that Davies’s simple self, by
being the subject of all his work, is simultaneously ubiquitous and invis-
ible: his achievement was to leave an autobiography that tells the reader
almost nothing about his own feelings, and poems entirely about himself
that leave no idea of the person who made them.

autobiographical disappearance

This autobiographical paradox becomes clearer by comparing Davies’s hit
Autobiographywith the considerable amount of contemporary writings
on, or by vagrants, for Davies was by no means the only tramp-writer of
the period. Fuelled by the problems of increasing homelessness amongst
large numbers of returning Boer War veterans, Edwardian society held a
dual attitude of official distaste and romantic yearning towards tramping.
In 1906 Parliament instigated a Departmental Committee Report on the
problem, which recommended labour camps and way-tickets (a kind of
internal passport) as a solution.^20 Other writers called for indefinite prison
sentences and compulsory sterilisation.^21 Against this condemnation was a
proliferation of more sympathetic accounts, either Borrovian descriptions
of the Open Road, the wind on the heath and the roving heart, or furtive
explorations into the foetid underworld of doss-houses, kips and spikes.
Davies’sAutobiographycontains both of these, and appeals to readers of
either sort eager for information on types of begging technique or the
amusing characters to be met on the road, yet its author keeps his distance
from his contemporaries’ characteristic narrative attitudes. The following
sentence, taken from his introduction to an edition ofMoll Flanders, well
describes theAutobiography’s technique: ‘The personal I, followed by the
verb of action, is in every sentence, and we are never allowed to see the
author himself behind his creation.’^22 Davies does not tell his tale as an
interior history: for all that he undergoes in the book – years of begging,
poverty and binges, losing a leg, and then being transported from the
lodging-house to the literary e ́lite – we learn surprisingly little of how he
felt. This is in marked contrast to the authors plunging into the urban
tramp-world, who tend to dwell lovingly not only on every festering

134 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism