Laudator Temporis Acti

Donald Davie, "The Cantos: Towards a Pedestrian Reading," Paideuma 1.1 (Spring-Summer, 1972) 55-62 (at 59-60):

And indeed I would insist on this: the first requirement for a study of Pound is a set of maps (preferably 1/2" to the mile) of at any rate certain regions of France, Italy and England; the second requirement is a set of Michelin Green Guides for France and Italy, and (if one is American) similar guides to the South of England. In this, the case of Pound is no different from other writers, or it is different only in degree. Yet, oddly, the only authors for whom we are ready to make this provision nowadays are the Irish ones, Joyce and Yeats. Everyone knows that a Street Directory of Dublin is essential to the reading of Joyce. There would be general agreement that maps of County Sligo and County Galway are essential aids to the study of Yeats. And perhaps most people qualified to judge would concede that there comes a time early in any study of Joyce where the student has to beat the Dublin streets on foot. Similarly no one who has attended the Yeats Summer School in Sligo will deny that the seminars and lectures are less profitable than driving to Glencar, or Gort, and walking in those places, or wandering in the demesne of Lissadell and under the shoulder of Ben Bulben. And yet we are shamefaced about this. It smacks of the Dickensian Society making pilgrimages to Rochester and Dover and Yarmouth; or of "poetry-lovers" haunting Grasmere and Coniston Water. Perhaps it does. But I incline to think that our grandfathers and grandmothers were in the right of it, and that no one can claim to understand Wordsworth who has not been to Hawkshead and Ambleside. The reason why we are embarrassed to admit this is that we have lived in an age when the self-sufficiency, the autonomy of poems has been elevated into dogma. Poems can be self-sufficient, leaning on no reality outside themselves other than the history and usage of the words out of which they are made. But in every age there have been poets who were uninterested in thus cutting their poems free of any but a linguistic reality, poets who are "realistic" and "mimetic" in the most straightforward senses of those two complicated words. In our age Pound, far more than Eliot or Yeats, is such a poet. And yet we have seen that the topography of Sligo (to which one should add the topography of at least one part of London, Bedford Park) is illuminating for the reader of Yeats. And who is to say that the topography of the Devon village of East Coker is unimportant to a reading of Eliot's Four Quartets? And yet how few of us have made that pilgrimage!

Id. (at 62):

Place and the spirit of place is the inspiration of more poetry than we nowadays like to admit; and to do that poetry justice the critic needs to turn himself into a tourist.

Related post: The Infinite.