In the closing pages of Yvor Winters’s Forms of Discovery (1968), the great poet and critic offers measured praise of the work of one of his former students. In Catherine Davis’s best poems, “the matter is serious” and “the style is impeccable.” Winters had long argued that poetry was an essentially moral act, an affair of rational definition and discipline of the will. For the serious poet, aesthetic form was a means of discovering the truth about reality and attuning one’s emotions accordingly. Through the crafting and contemplation of the poem, he held, thought and feeling could find harmony and one could achieve self-mastery.
His words suggest that Catherine Breese Davis (1924-2002) was a modern master of this moral art.
Indeed, she was. Winters admired and anthologized her poems, as did Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson in their important midcentury collection, New Poets of England and America (1957). There, Davis’s work stands alongside some of the greatest poets of late modernism. Donald Justice would later teach her in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and become a lifelong admirer and advocate. They all saw what few others have had a chance to see before the publication of this valuable little book: In a good number of her many chiseled, yet lively, poems, Davis demonstrates both the fruitfulness of Winters’s poetic theory and the justness of his praise.
An early poem, “The Leaves,” provides her most comprehensive moral evaluation of the world. It begins with an idyllic image, where the literal light of the sun gives rise to and suffuses the shadows cast by foliage; but her language soon indicates this setting is an analogy for the hypothetical divine light that creates all things, and the created beings that are, therefore, the “shadows” such light causes to be. As the romantic poets once suggested, there would seem to be a correspondence, or sympathy, between the light and shadow found in the natural world and the divine mind that is its origin.
But Davis rebukes this poetic seeming: “when the leaves are blown, / They go not willfully,” she writes, nor do they “Ponder the light, the shade.” For a moment, the natural world is less than it had seemed to be: It is merely matter, subject to the arbitrary winds of change. Nature is a flux and destitute of lasting significance. Or most of it is. “We,” with our intellects, have an abiding need to “find / Some likeness for the mind.”
Like Robert Frost before her, Davis introduces the romantic desire to find signs of an intelligible and loving spiritual order in the natural world only to undermine it. But in contrast to Frost, she holds that we, by necessity, search the brute material forms of that world not for an image of the mind of God—the light—but for a likeness of our own minds. Human nature is essentially poetic; it goes out in search of what used to be called “vehicles”—concrete images—to represent metaphorically the “tenors,” the literal nature, of our minds.
To engage in this is not a kind of falsifying, wishful thinking; it is our chief means to self-understanding. Poetic likenesses give us stable images to define, to understand, what it means to be ourselves mere “mark[s] of change,” no less caught up in the flux of becoming and dissolution than the leaves of a tree.
Davis’s early poems are explicit acts of definition. Well-wrought lyrics such as “Routine,” “Patience,” “Discretion,” and “Obsession” capture the meaning of each term with precision. “Obsession,” for instance, addresses that pathology this way:
As the critical essays that follow this generous selection of Davis’s poems emphasize, the poet’s most obsessive theme was the experience of loss. She had no romantic mystical philosophy to obscure the ephemerality of things, but only a sense that poetic form as a moral act was the necessary means to stand, for a time, firm against the inevitability of loss. One of her several fine epigrams captures this well.
Poetry does not lead us after the “albatross” of the spirit, but provides a shelter, an approximation to permanence, where the mind can come to knowledge. In her sonnet sequence, For Tender Stalkes, Davis defines her view of the world against the theories of romantic love that emerged among the Petrarchan sonneteers of the Renaissance. In their sonnets, the beauty of a young maiden was often taken as a shadow, a figure, of the divine beauty. To love her was, therefore, a stage of the soul’s ascent to God as Love Itself. Davis replies:
The gorgeous Christian Platonism of the Renaissance is (in her view) an imaginative consolation for the fear of death. In contrast, she asks only to be able to turn fear and sorrow into classically honed lines of verse, as Catullus did before her:
A Davis poem transforms loss into a kind of structured permanence, but also prepares us for what Kenneth Fields calls in this volume a “stoic” acceptance of mortality. She captures that acceptance well in her best-known poem, a villanelle called “After a Time.”
One need not take Petrarch for a dreamer, the romantics for “high-flown,” or Davis’s poetry of definition for the last word about things, to admire both her work and the example it sets for the practice of the art. She demonstrates, time and again, the essential truth of Yvor Winters’s claims: The writing of poetry is a quest after true knowledge of reality; it is a supple way of taking the measure of the world—and our own measure, too.
James Matthew Wilson teaches at Villanova. His latest book is The Fortunes of Poetry
in an Age of Unmaking.
