pensamiento critico y practica poetica en donald davie - Universidad ...

Bernard Semmel” (ED, 225) que “the truly disaffected dissenters were Unitarian
or Ouaker, not Calvinst” (ED, 257>. Calvinismo equivale así a ortodoxia política
‘Semmel suggests that if we ask what the loyalist dissenters had in common,
one plausible and surprising answer might be: John Calvin. For certainly it
seems to be the Calvinists among the dissenters who are conspicuous by their
absence from pro-American and later pro-French demonstrations and writing”
(ED, 255>.
Esto nos lleva a considerar el tercer factor que Davie destaca en su
canonización del siglo XVIII: la labor cultural del dissent, especialmente
calvinista. Davie comienza reconociendo la tópica acusación de filiteismo
hecha al dissent:
razones:
‘Chapel’, it may be said, fails to figure in literary history as crucially as in social
and political h¡story, precisely because literature, and the creative and
performing arts in general, are just what ‘chapel’ distrusts, if indeed it does nol
positively condemn them. This is a commonly received notion; for what is Ihe
dissenter (‘Ihe nonconformist’) if nol the heir of those Cromwellian Roundheads
who defaced Ihe icons of our cathedrals and parish churches? The chapel-goer
is the iconoclast, by origin and by definition; the Iiterary ¡kon, no Iess Ihan the
painted or the carved (graven images’), is what he is comrnitted to destroying,
or lo tolerating only on unacceptabiy restrictive and emasculating terms - and
in this way the ‘Chapel’ interest does indeed play a crucial and momentous part
in the literary history of England, as ‘Ihe enemy’, as precise¡y that which, in
each generation, Engiish art¡sts must do battle with, and circumvent es besí
they can. On Ihis showing, you perceive, that my situation aH those years ego -
es a young Baptist in love with English poetry, and determined to write poems
himself - was quite sirnply anomalous, self-contradictory. (ED, 6)
Nuestro autor indaga las causas de esta situación y encuentra dos
urs!, Ihe Establishment (in its strict sense, as the church of England) has in
every generation, including our own, disseminated the canaró that dissent is of
its nature philistine; and, second, in Ihe nineteenth century, dissent cooperated,
by becoming as philistine es Ihe Ihurch had always said it was. In
Ihis, English dissent betrayed lIs own tradition. (ED, 47)
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