Donald Davie's criticism conveys the sense that the making and criticizing of poems continue to matter. Such critics as Harold Rosenberg have noticed the absence of a genuine avant-garde in the arts today and have even questioned the usefulness of the notion avant-garde. If the notion is dead, and that is perhaps just as well, one misses the sense of historic enterprise which the idea of the avant-garde carried and which is noticeable everywhere in the criticism of such modernists as Pound and Eliot. The modernists, however much they differed on fundamental matters, all hoped to go beyond the failures of nineteenth-century art. Yet scholars of modernism have encouraged us to see twentieth-century poetry as a footnote, an impressive footnote, to nineteenth-century culture.

The Poet in the Imaginary Museum: Essays of Two Decades … publishes a selection of Davie's essays dating—despite the title—from 1950 to 1978. It reveals that Davie's mind has from the beginning pushed forward with the same preoccupations although he has modified particular views, as he acknowledges in new postscripts to some of the essays.

Like the early modernists whom he admires, Davie wishes the poet to keep his head in a confusing world by embracing the old role of the artist as artificer or maker, rather than secular prophet, thinker, or creator of alternative worlds…. Davie thinks of the poet as working somehow like other artists, and he resorts readily to analogies between poetry and other arts, especially music, sculpture, and architecture. When he talks about liking poems which have been so carefully made that they "can be seen all round" it is obvious that his metaphor is drawn from the art of sculpture.

Davie holds to his staunch aestheticism, unafraid of the shades of Pater or Wilde, because he argues not confusion between religion and art but a genuine art for art's sake. Religion is something else. In a hard-hitting review of the poems of Galway Kinnell, he indicts American poets of the last twenty years for dissipating "the artistic and intellectual riches accumulated by the great decades of American poetry earlier in this century." They have taken "American poetry back out of the twentieth century into the nineteenth, from the astringent and sophisticated world of Allen Tate and Yvor Winters back into the world of Emerson and Whitman." And he goes on to compare the unbelief and anxiety of much contemporary poetry to the "tediously familiar dilemma of those late-Victorians who vociferously 'lost their faith.'"

Davie resists the conception of the poem as primarily the expression or communication of the private anxiety of the poet. While he is sympathetic to the confessional poems of Robert Lowell and to the historical circumstances which made these poems all but necessary, he finally wonders what desperate game Lowell plays with his readers in his last poems and whether Lowell can tell what to chisel away and what to leave in the stone. As an artist, does Lowell know what he is doing?

Davie is not asking for an impersonal poetry characterized chiefly by the New Critical virtues of irony and detachment. Instead he seems to be arguing for the "radiant paradox" embodied for him in Pushkin: "the union of impregnable impersonality and reserve as an artist with eager and vulnerable frankness as a person."

One corollary of Davie's view of the poet as maker is his attempt to see the poet as a member of an international artistic community, a community which clearly exists among sculptors, painters, architects, and musicians but which seems to be less of a reality among poets. This collection of essays reveals that Davie has taken up more than once André Malraux's metaphor of the twentieth-century imaginary museum which makes contemporary the art of all times and places. But in "Poetry and the Other Modern Arts" he finally seems to conclude that the poet can never be so international as the painter although he must somehow escape the danger of becoming provincial in a sense which implies philistinism. The poet is an occasional visitor to the imaginary museum; he doesn't live there because "the art of poetry has not been, is not now, and can never be, an international vocabulary. All the other arts nowadays release us from the prisons we were born in; but poetry forces us back inside the iron cage of being of a certain race speaking a certain language." (pp. 577-79)

For Davie, then, the poet is a maker, but a maker using a particular language which places him in relation to a particular culture and possibly a particular place or particular places. Not literary nationalism is at issue here, but principally the exigencies of poetic craft. It cannot be an accident that Davie himself recently published a book of poems entitled The Shires, an abbreviated and personal Poly-Olbion. (p. 579)

From the beginning of his career Davie's attempt to go beyond the romantic tradition toward a conception of the poet as maker has carried him back to the eighteenth-century poets. Purity of Diction in English Verse (1953) is the engaged criticism of a contemporary poet who is trying to write poems which go beyond symbolism and post-symbolism. Davie's A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700–1930 is a eulogy of the taste and cultivation of eighteenth-century dissenters who were his own forebears, although he writes not as a dissenter but as a son of Dissent. The reader may suspect that Davie is working a thin vein here, and Davie acknowledges his reader's suspicions in what was first delivered as the Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1976.

The key to what Davie is doing can be found in his earlier book Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964). There, writing about the relation of genre to subject in Pound's The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, he states that the central clue to "the entire labyrinth" of Pound's work is that "a question of poetic genre, and of the marrying of genres, is necessarily a question of entertaining certain ranges of perceptions rather than others, and of combining some perceptions with others in unprecedented ways." For all of his aetheticism, or perhaps because of it, Davie's essays move freely to social and cultural questions and increasingly to religion. For example he argues elsewhere that much contemporary American poetry is technically retrogressive because it is filled with religious yearnings which refuse religion's discipline.

The history of dissenting literature since 1700 is for Davie one of decline corresponding to a decline in the intellectual, social, and spiritual awareness of Dissent. Davie locates the characteristic artistic achievements of Dissent not in the century of Milton and Bunyan but in the century of Watts. What the eighteenth-century dissenters achieved in the poetry of their hymns and the architecture of their chapels was "simplicity, sobriety, and measure," which Davie argues are the qualities Calvinist aesthetics demands of the art-object. Calvinist art at its best does not deny sensual pleasure but deploys it "with an unusually frugal, and therefore exquisite, fastidiousness." Using phrases reminiscent of The Purity of Diction in English Verse, Davie defends Calvinist aesthetics because "the aesthetic and the moral perceptions have, built into them and near to the heart of them, the perception of licence, of abandonment, of superfluity, foreseen, even invited, and yet in the end, fended off." This is almost to see Calvinist art through Confucian spectacles. (pp. 579-80)

Davie has written a persuasive defense of one strand or one moment in dissenting tradition. He has been wise to include in his book photographs of eighteenth-century chapels which reveal the aesthetic discrimination possible among the Old Dissenters. This book, however, is not an exercise in eighteenth-century historical scholarship any more than was The Purity of Diction in English Verse. Instead it is a contemporary English poet's investigation into what English art has been and what it might become. It is characteristic of Davie always to ask the artist to fend off provincialism at the same time that he locates himself in particular landscapes; and so it is central to his argument that the dissenting tradition at its best "does not offer an insular alternative to European culture, a way of 'keeping out', but rather a way of 'going in' on special, and specially rewarding, terms."

A Gathered Church may seem to be a work of filial piety by a man once a Baptist. But by locating and defending the aesthetic excellence in dissenting tradition. Davie has written an important chapter in the aesthetic history of England, contributed to the debate about the nature of English culture and its future, and enlarged our understanding of the way religious conviction affects the way an artist makes an art-object. (p. 581)