british poetry in the age of modernism

contraries – Thomas, Davies, Arthur Ransome and John Freeman along-
side Wyndham Lewis, F. S. Flint and Douglas Goldring – indicating their
common liking for socially unaligned/unconventional perspectives, be it
children, gypsies or foreigners, as in Lewis’s caustic analyses of Spain.
Davies’sAutobiography, on the other hand, is interested not in how to be a
tramp, but how its author survived when he found himself to be one. Its
contiguous placing of emotionally non-consecutive material – rather as a
doss-house unites essentially isolated men – makes it lessconcordiathan
discors. It is no wonder that when Davies himself was asked to graceThe
Tramp’s pages, he complained to Thomas that its contributors were
writing under false pretences: ‘What I ought to be paid well for is not a
good literary article, but for being a real tramp contributor, probably the
only one that will ever contribute to that paper.’^46

artificial simplicity

But contribute he did, and to many other magazines as well, fromCountry
Lifeto Middleton Murry’s pioneering modern art magazine, Rhythm.
Given the opportunity to be popular, he took it: his bibliography reveals
that twenty-five out of the fifty-sevenSongs of Joy,twenty-four out of
forty-four poems inFoliageand seventeen out of nineteen poems inChild
Lovershad already appeared elsewhere. Davies knew his market lay more
with the open-air market than the grim-reality one, and successive edi-
tions of his poems show the number of simple, happy nature-poems
increasing as the poems about life in the doss-house decrease. As he
remarked in the introduction to a further volume of reminiscences:
‘Now, although I am going to write about some of the greatest artists
and writers of their day, I feel certain that not one of them would take the
least offence on hearing their names mentioned with the names of those
other great artists – Harlem Baldy and Detroit Fatty.’^47
Like the champion beggars he mentions, Davies’s artistry was that he
knew how to work on people’s feelings. If the public wanted simple
poetry, then they got it, and the lack of structure in hisAutobiography
only helped him to appeal to the supposedly helpless simplicity of tramps,
an explanation often expounded by Edwardian writers struggling to
understand why vagrants carried on the way they did. Mary Higgs saw
tramps as nomads, and following the law of recapitulation, behaving like
children who cannot ‘fix their attention’ on anything.^48 W. H. Dawson
believed the tramp was a hopeless case after any time on the road: the
‘manhood has left him and there remains for the ratepayers an idle,

140 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism