SOURCE: “David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role,” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXV, No. 1, January-March, 1967, pp. 193-229.

In the following excerpt, Raine discusses the life and work of David Gascoyne, contending that Gascoyne is a master poet who has achieved absolute imaginative truth in his work.

“Genius, Poet: do we know what these words mean? An inspired Soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature's own great fire-heart, to see the Truth, and speak it, and do it.” (Carlyle, Past and Present)

The publication in 1965 of the Collected Poems¹ of David Gascoyne brought to the notice of a generation to whom his name is unfamiliar (for his latest work, Night Thoughts, was published in 1956) the work of an outstanding poet.

David Gascoyne was born in 1916; his father was a bank-clerk (subsequently for a time manager of a bank in the small town of Fordingbridge between Salisbury and Poole...