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Overview
"Donald Davie was a great critic of the eighteenth century, its literature, its religion and politics, its culture in the broadest sense. Many of his earliest essays, especially those written in Dublin, the city of Berkeley, Goldsmith and Swift, were rooted in the Enlightenment and its abiding gifts. He took his creative bearings from the eighteenth century; this is what made him such an unusual poet; and this is why, when he writes about Berkeley, or Swift, or Goldsmith, Smart, Cowper, Doctor Johnson, the Augustan Lyric, the hymn writers, the Dissenters, diction and irony, he commands our attention." For Davie, the act of critical engagement is a challenge to all the vigours of the mind and spirit, and he makes accessible areas of our culture that Romanticism and lazy reading have often led us to dismiss. To Davie, what typified the eighteenth century was not 'rationalistic arrogance but ... its humbled awe before the revealed plentitude of human terrains and human cultures'. Davie enables us to see the extent to which both Romanticism and our own age draw their energies from their eighteenth-century roots.Synopsis
"Donald Davie was a great critic of the eighteenth century, its literature, its religion and politics, its culture in the broadest sense. Many of his earliest essays, especially those written in Dublin, the city of Berkeley, Goldsmith and Swift, were rooted in the Enlightenment and its abiding gifts. He took his creative bearings from the eighteenth century; this is what made him such an unusual poet; and this is why, when he writes about Berkeley, or Swift, or Goldsmith, Smart, Cowper, Doctor Johnson, the Augustan Lyric, the hymn writers, the Dissenters, diction and irony, he commands our attention." For Davie, the act of critical engagement is a challenge to all the vigours of the mind and spirit, and he makes accessible areas of our culture that Romanticism and lazy reading have often led us to dismiss. To Davie, what typified the eighteenth century was not 'rationalistic arrogance but ... its humbled awe before the revealed plentitude of human terrains and human cultures'. Davie enables us to see the extent to which both Romanticism and our own age draw their energies from their eighteenth-century roots.