The following essay on Roy Fisher began as a commission for a Donald Davie festschrift on his retirement from Vanderbilt, but was rejected on the grounds that not enough had yet been written about Fisher. Crozier extended the piece to develop the connections between ‘Introit’ and City before publishing it in PN Review, Volume 18, Number 3, January/February 1992. In a letter to me of 21 October 2004 Crozier commented on Fisher’s reaction to what Davie had written about him in his 1973 appraisal of the effect of Thomas Hardy on contemporary British poetry: ‘When Thomas Hardy and British Poetry was published I remember that Fisher was dismayed – no, seriously upset and offended – by what Davie said about him. If what he had said about his own writing can be taken seriously then of course he was right to be.’
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