- Davie, Donald Alfred
- (1922-1995)Born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, the son of a Baptist shopkeeper, he was educated at the local grammar school. After five years' service in the Royal Navy during World War II, he graduated in 1947 and gained a doctorate in 1951 both from Cambridge University. Based at Murmansk during the war, he learned to read Polish and Russian poetry and translated widely in both languages throughout his life. He taught literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and in several English universities until 1968, then at Stanford and Vanderbilt universities. From the mid 1940s, he was a key figure in the "Movement." He retired to Exeter, Devon, in 1988, where he died. Some of his publications: Purity of Diction in English Verse, 1952. New and Selected Poems, 1961. Collected Poems, 1993. Poems and Melodramas, 1995. New Collected Poems, 2002. Some of his poems: "1945," "Across the Bay," "After the Calamitous Convoy ( July 1942)," "Barnsley Cricket Club," "Chernobyl: A Disaster," "Hawkshead and Dachau in a Christmas Glass," "Ordinary God," "The Elect," "The Forests of Lithuania," "The Fountain of Arethusa," "The North Sea, in a Snowstorm."Sources: Collected Poems of Donald Davie. Neil Powell, ed. Carcanet, 2002. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Biography of Donald Alfred Davie. Talk Poetry (http://www.talkpoetry.com/pages/brief/brief.php?id=9&PHPSESSID=). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.
British and Irish poets. A biographical dictionary. William Stewart. 2015.