Davie, Donald Alfred (1922–1995)

English poet and literary critic. His verse has a highly wrought style and grace, wedded to interests in history and politics, as exemplified in The Forests of Lithuania (1959). His later work is as carefully constructed, but explores freer syntactic and metrical forms. Among Davie's critical writings are Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972), and Pound (1976), about the poet Ezra Pound.

Born in Yorkshire and educated at Cambridge, Davie lectured at Irish, English, and US universities; he was professor of English at Stanford University, California 1968–78 and at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 1978–88. His first published volumes were Brides of Reason (1955) and A Winter Talent (1957). Collected Poems appeared in 1972, 1983, and 1990, and other works of poetry include The Shires (1975), In the Stopping Train (1977), and The Psalms in English (1996, posthumously).