SOURCE: “‘Or, Solitude’: A Reading,” in On Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie, edited by Vereen Bell and Laurence Lerner, Vanderbilt University Press, 1988, pp. 81-87.

In the following essay, Heaney deems “Or, Solitude” a “poetic happening” and an “important event in the history of British poetry over the last quarter of a century.”

An unexpected sensation of furtherance: that is what I remember of my first reading of Donald Davie's poem “Or, Solitude” in an issue of New Statesman late in 1965. What exactly the poem meant I could not have said, nor could I have formulated my response in the terms I now propose, yet the actual experience of the lines did constitute a poetic “happening.” In them, the consensus that usually allows the English imagination to order reality on a domestic scale had been for the moment refused, and English poetry was receiving one of its...