SOURCE: Davie, Donald. “Niedecker.” Parnassus 14, no. 2 (1987): 201-07.

In the following essay, Davie reviews two collections of Niedecker's poetry: Granite Pail and From this Condensery, both of which were published in 1985.

I don't want to sound like the late Philip Larkin, or like his and my friends Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. It's many years since I expected to agree with these men when judging poets and poetry. I expect to agree more often with people like Cid Corman and Ed Dorn and Jonathan Williams, Kenneth Cox and Charles Tomlinson, above all with the late, great, and lamented Basil Bunting. Imagine my chagrin when I see in the current promotion of the late Lorine Niedecker (so many “late”s, alas) little more than what Larkin and Amis and Conquest would see—a specially impudent confidence trick on the part of the aging avant-garde, a salesman's hype to which Tomlinson...