with the sophisticated modernism of the St Ives group. Because Davies’s
work will not subordinate or proportion any of its elements, his own
position can never be separated from it, and its utter directness becomes
by the same token a position of complete transparency. As Thomas himself
commented, Davies’s verse had an ‘archaic’ simplicity, ‘far removed from a
merely modern simplicity, like Walt Whitman’.^61
As a unifier of incompatible perspectives, Davies was perhaps an
appropriate editor of the Poetry Bookshop’sShorter Lyrics of the Twentieth
Century( 1922 ), an anthology which printed his own work alongside
Georgian, Imagist and war poetry. How much was his own choice and
how much a hidden Harold Monro’s is unknown, but it does not much
matter: if the latter, Monro saw Davies as an appropriate figurehead to
unite Pound, H. D., Aldington, Flint and Lawrence with Thomas, de la
Mare, Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Gibson and Brooke. Davies was at pains to
stress in the introduction that ‘this is an anthology of poems, not of
poets’, a phrase whose caution immediately suggests the opposite, that the
anthology is very aware of what it is doing with the artists concerned – as
Davies later suggests, ‘an artist’s friends are his enemies, as far as his work
is concerned, and his real enemies are his best friends’.^62 The comment is
also apposite to his own work, for in many ways Davies is the original of
the Georgian stereotype of simple poetry about trees, birds and flowers,
and Eliot cited him as an example of the dangers of poetry without
philosophy, ‘purely conceited’ in its indiscriminate contentment.^63 Yet
he did so by aligning Davies’s method with the surrealist work of Cocteau
and Breton, who also aimed to overthrow any reflective control for a
poetry which would be an indivisible unity of instinct and word. Davies’s
inscrutable combination of mutually incompatible perspectives is in its
own way as hostile to perspective as the multiple voices of modernism: it
presents its modern reader with the equal disorientation of unity.
146 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism