John Davidson (poet)
Encyclopedia
John Davidson was a Scottish
poet
, playwright
and novelist, best known for his ballad
s. He also did translations from French and German. In 1909, financial difficulties, as well as both physical and mental health problems, led to his suicide.
, East Renfrewshire
as the son of Alexander Davidson, an Evangelical Union
minister and Helen née Crockett of Elgin. His family removed to Greenock
in 1862 where he was educated at Highlanders' Academy there and entered the chemical laboratory of Walker's Sugarhouse refinery in his 13th year, returning after one year to school as a pupil teacher. In Public Analysts' Office, 1870-71. In these employments he developed an interest in science which became an important characteristic of his poetry. In 1872 he returned for four years to the Highlanders' Academy as a pupil-teacher, and, after a year at Edinburgh University (1876-7), received in 1877 his first scholastic employment at Alexander's Charity, Glasgow. During the next six years he held positions in the following schools : Perth Academy (1878–81), Kelvinside Academy, Glasgow (1881-2), and Hutchinson's Charity, Paisley (1883-4). He varied his career by spending a year as clerk in a Glasgow thread firm (1884-5), and subsequently taught in Morrison's Academy, Crieff (1885-8), and in a private school at Greenock (1888-9). Married 1885.
Besides writing for the Speaker, the Glasgow Herald, and other papers, he produced several novels and tales, of which the best was Perfervid (1890). But these prose works were written for a livelihood.
had words of praise for In a Music Hall. He called it, "An example of a new writer seeking out ‘new subject matter, new emotions’". Yeats's wrote of his emotional dispute with Davidson in Autobiographies (1955). The second collection established his reputation among the discerning few. His early plays were republished in one volume in 1894, and henceforward he turned his attention more and more completely to verse. A volume of vigorous Ballads and Songs (1894), his most popular work, was followed in turn by a second series of Fleet Street Eclogues (1896) and by New Ballads (1897) and The Last Ballad (1899).
His later verse, which is often fine rhetoric rather than poetry, expressed the belief which is summed up in the last words that he wrote, "Men are the universe become conscious; the simplest man should consider himself too great to be called after any name." The corollary was that every man was to be himself to the utmost of his power, and the strongest was to rule. Davidson professed to reject all existing philosophies, including that of Nietzsche, as inadequate, but Nietzsche's influence is traceable in his argument. The poet planned ultimately to embody his revolutionary creed in a trilogy entitled God and Mammon. Only two plays, however, were written, The Triumph of Mammon (1907) and Mammon and his Message (1908).
's Pour la Couronne in 1896 and Victor Hugo
's Ruy Blas in 1904, the former being produced as, For the Crown, at the Lyceum Theatre in 1896, the latter as A Queen's Romance at the Imperial Theatre.
and by Robert Bryden
. A caricature by Max Beerbohm
appeared in The Chapbook, (1907), and William Rothenstein
did a portrait of him for The Yellow Book. In Men and Memories (1931), Rothenstein said that when Max Beerbohm looked at his pictures of Davidson, he had complimented him on the 'subtle way he had handled his toupée'. Rothenstein wrote that he had not noticed tht he was wearing one.
Frank Harris, a member of the Rhymers' Club described him in 1889 thus:
did what he could to help him financially, but poverty, ill-health, and his declining powers, exacerbated by the onset of cancer, caused profound hopelessness and clinical depression. Late in 1908, Davidson left London to reside at Penzance
. On 23 March 1909, he disappeared from his house there, under circumstances which left little doubt that he had drowned himself. Among his papers was found the manuscript of a new work, Fleet Street Poems, with a letter containing the words, "This will be my last book." His body, which was discovered by some fishermen in Mount's Bay on 18 September, was, in accordance with his known wishes, buried at sea. In his will he desired that no biography should be written, none of his unpublished works published, and "no word except of my writing is ever to appear in any book of mine as long as the copyright endures."
The assumption that he took his own life is consistent with what is known of his temperament and his ideas. In The Testament of John Davidson, published the year before his death, he anticipates this fate:
and Wallace Stevens
. T.S. Eliot, who was especially fond of the poem 'Thirty Bob a Week' (In Ballads and Songs (1894)). Davidon's poem "In the Isle of Dogs", for example, is a clear intertext of later poems such as Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West
".
He translated:
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
and novelist, best known for his ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
s. He also did translations from French and German. In 1909, financial difficulties, as well as both physical and mental health problems, led to his suicide.
Scotland
He was born at BarrheadBarrhead
Barrhead is a town in East Renfrewshire, Scotland, southwest of Glasgow on the edge of the Gleniffer Braes. As of the 2001 census its population was 19,813....
, East Renfrewshire
East Renfrewshire
East Renfrewshire is one of 32 council areas of Scotland. Until 1975 it formed part of the county of Renfrewshire for local government purposes along with the modern council areas of Renfrewshire and Inverclyde...
as the son of Alexander Davidson, an Evangelical Union
Evangelical Union (Scotland)
The Evangelical Union was a religious denomination which originated in the suspension of the Rev. James Morison, minister of a United Secession congregation in Kilmarnock, Scotland, for certain views regarding faith, the work of the Holy Spirit in salvation, and the extent of the atonement, which...
minister and Helen née Crockett of Elgin. His family removed to Greenock
Greenock
Greenock is a town and administrative centre in the Inverclyde council area in United Kingdom, and a former burgh within the historic county of Renfrewshire, located in the west central Lowlands of Scotland...
in 1862 where he was educated at Highlanders' Academy there and entered the chemical laboratory of Walker's Sugarhouse refinery in his 13th year, returning after one year to school as a pupil teacher. In Public Analysts' Office, 1870-71. In these employments he developed an interest in science which became an important characteristic of his poetry. In 1872 he returned for four years to the Highlanders' Academy as a pupil-teacher, and, after a year at Edinburgh University (1876-7), received in 1877 his first scholastic employment at Alexander's Charity, Glasgow. During the next six years he held positions in the following schools : Perth Academy (1878–81), Kelvinside Academy, Glasgow (1881-2), and Hutchinson's Charity, Paisley (1883-4). He varied his career by spending a year as clerk in a Glasgow thread firm (1884-5), and subsequently taught in Morrison's Academy, Crieff (1885-8), and in a private school at Greenock (1888-9). Married 1885.
London
Having taken to literature, he went in 1889 to London where he frequented 'Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese' and joined the 'Rhymers’ Club'. Davidson's first published work was Bruce, a chronicle play in the Elizabethan manner, which appeared with a Glasgow imprint in 1886. Four other plays, Smith, a Tragic Farce (1888), An Unhistorical Pastoral (1889), Aromantic Farce (1889), and the brilliant pantomimic Scaramouch in Naxos (1889) were also published while he was in Scotland.Besides writing for the Speaker, the Glasgow Herald, and other papers, he produced several novels and tales, of which the best was Perfervid (1890). But these prose works were written for a livelihood.
Verse
Davidson's true medium was verse. In a Music Hall and other Poems (1891) suggested what Fleet Street Eclogues (1893) proved, that Davidson possessed a genuine and distinctive poetic gift. YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
had words of praise for In a Music Hall. He called it, "An example of a new writer seeking out ‘new subject matter, new emotions’". Yeats's wrote of his emotional dispute with Davidson in Autobiographies (1955). The second collection established his reputation among the discerning few. His early plays were republished in one volume in 1894, and henceforward he turned his attention more and more completely to verse. A volume of vigorous Ballads and Songs (1894), his most popular work, was followed in turn by a second series of Fleet Street Eclogues (1896) and by New Ballads (1897) and The Last Ballad (1899).
'Testaments'
Finally Davidson engaged on a series of "Testaments", in which he gave definite expression to his philosophy. These volumes were entitled The Testament of a Vivisector (1901),The Testament of a Man Forbid (1901), The Testament of an Empire Builder (1902), and The Testament of John Davidson (1908). Though he disclaimed the title of philosopher, he expounded an original philosophy which was at once materialistic and aristocratic. The cosmic process, as interpreted by evolution, was for him a fruitful source of inspiration.His later verse, which is often fine rhetoric rather than poetry, expressed the belief which is summed up in the last words that he wrote, "Men are the universe become conscious; the simplest man should consider himself too great to be called after any name." The corollary was that every man was to be himself to the utmost of his power, and the strongest was to rule. Davidson professed to reject all existing philosophies, including that of Nietzsche, as inadequate, but Nietzsche's influence is traceable in his argument. The poet planned ultimately to embody his revolutionary creed in a trilogy entitled God and Mammon. Only two plays, however, were written, The Triumph of Mammon (1907) and Mammon and his Message (1908).
Family
In 1885 Davidson married Margaret, daughter of John McArthur of Perth. She survived him with two sons, Alexander (b. 1887) and Menzies (b. 1889).Other works
Davidson was a prolific writer. Besides the works cited, he wrote many other works including, The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender (1895), a novel which included flagellation erotica and contributed an introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets (Renaissance edition, 1908), which, like his various prefaces and essays, shows him a subtle literary critic.Translations
He translated Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1892), François CoppéeFrançois Coppée
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.-Biography:He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864...
's Pour la Couronne in 1896 and Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
's Ruy Blas in 1904, the former being produced as, For the Crown, at the Lyceum Theatre in 1896, the latter as A Queen's Romance at the Imperial Theatre.
Portraits
Davidson's portrait was drawn by Walter SickertWalter Sickert
Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....
and by Robert Bryden
Robert Bryden
Robert Bryden was a Scots artist and sculptor.Bryden was born in Coylton in South Ayrshire, Scotland. After a period working in the office of Hunter & Morris, architects in Ayr, he moved to London where he stayed for fifteen years studying, at the RSA and the Royal Academy, making a living from...
. A caricature by Max Beerbohm
Max Beerbohm
Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist best known today for his 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson.-Early life:...
appeared in The Chapbook, (1907), and William Rothenstein
William Rothenstein
Sir William Rothenstein was an English painter, draughtsman and writer on art.-Life and work:William Rothenstein was born into a German-Jewish family in Bradford, West Yorkshire. His father, Moritz, emigrated from Germany in 1859 to work in Bradford's burgeoning textile industry...
did a portrait of him for The Yellow Book. In Men and Memories (1931), Rothenstein said that when Max Beerbohm looked at his pictures of Davidson, he had complimented him on the 'subtle way he had handled his toupée'. Rothenstein wrote that he had not noticed tht he was wearing one.
Frank Harris, a member of the Rhymers' Club described him in 1889 thus:
"... a little below middle height, but strongly built with square shoulders and remarkably fine face and head; the features were almost clasically regular, the eyes dark brown and large, the forehead high, the hair and moustache black. His manners were perfectly frank and natural; he met everyone in the same unaffected kindly human way; I never saw a trace in him of snobbishness or incivility. Possibly a great man, I said to myself, certainly a man of genius, for simplicity of manner alone is in England almost a proof of extraordinary endowment."
Drowning
In 1906 he was awarded a civil list pension of £100 per annum and George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
did what he could to help him financially, but poverty, ill-health, and his declining powers, exacerbated by the onset of cancer, caused profound hopelessness and clinical depression. Late in 1908, Davidson left London to reside at Penzance
Penzance
Penzance is a town, civil parish, and port in Cornwall, England, in the United Kingdom. It is the most westerly major town in Cornwall and is approximately 75 miles west of Plymouth and 300 miles west-southwest of London...
. On 23 March 1909, he disappeared from his house there, under circumstances which left little doubt that he had drowned himself. Among his papers was found the manuscript of a new work, Fleet Street Poems, with a letter containing the words, "This will be my last book." His body, which was discovered by some fishermen in Mount's Bay on 18 September, was, in accordance with his known wishes, buried at sea. In his will he desired that no biography should be written, none of his unpublished works published, and "no word except of my writing is ever to appear in any book of mine as long as the copyright endures."
The assumption that he took his own life is consistent with what is known of his temperament and his ideas. In The Testament of John Davidson, published the year before his death, he anticipates this fate:
- "None should outlive his power. . . . Who kills
- Himself subdues the conqueror of kings;
- Exempt from death is he who takes his life;
- My time has come."
Influence on other poets
Davidson's poetry was a key early influence on important Modernist poets, in particular, his compatriot Hugh MacDiarmidHugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve , a significant Scottish poet of the 20th century. He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century...
and Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
. T.S. Eliot, who was especially fond of the poem 'Thirty Bob a Week' (In Ballads and Songs (1894)). Davidon's poem "In the Isle of Dogs", for example, is a clear intertext of later poems such as Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West
The Idea of Order at Key West
"The Idea of Order at Key West" is a poem by Wallace Stevens. It appears in his 1936 book Ideas of Order.-External links:* at poets.org...
".
Works
- The North Wall (1885)
- Diabolus Amans (1885), verse drama
- Bruce (1886 ) a drama in five acts
- Smith (1888) a tragedy
- Plays (1889)
- An Unhistorical Pastoral, a Romantic Farce
- Scaramouch in Naxos
- Perfervid: The Career of Ninian Jamieson, (1890) with 23 Original Illustrations by Harry Furniss, Ward & Downey, Ltd., London.
- The Great Men, And a Practical Novelist (1891) Illustrated by E. J. Ellis. Ward & Downey, Ltd., London.
- In a Music Hall, and other Poems (1891) Ward & Downey, Ltd., London.
- Laura Ruthven's Widowhood (with C. J. Wills), (1892)
- Fleet Street Eclogues (1893)] http://books.google.com/books?id=Umk-AAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
- The Knight of the Maypole, (1903)
- Sentences and Paragraphs (1893)
- Ballads and Songs (1894) John Lane Publishers, London http://books.google.com/books?id=DhMMAQAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
- Baptist Lake (1894) Ward & Downey, Ltd., London.
- A Random Itinerary (1894)
- A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl LavenderA Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl LavenderA Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, which Lasted One Night and One Day; with a History of the Pursuit of Earl Lavender and Lord Brumm by Mrs. Scamler and Maud Emblem, is a comical novel, written by Scots poet and playwright John Davidson, published in 1895...
(1895) - St. George's Day (1895)
- Fleet Street Eclogues (Second Series) (1896) http://books.google.com/books?id=BeqFqEbMNxAC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
- Miss Armstrong's and Other Circumstances (1896)
- The Pilgrimage of Strongsoul and Other Stories (1896)
- New Ballads (1897)
- Godfrida, a play (1898)
- The Last Ballad (1899)
- Self's the Man, a tragi-comedy, (1901)
- The Testament of a Man Forbid (1901)
- The Testament of a Vivisector (1901)
- The Testament of an Empire Builder (1902)
- A Rosary, (1903) Grant Richards, London http://books.google.com/books?id=G0BDAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
- The Knight of the Maypole: A Comedy in Four Acts (1903)
- The Testament of a Prime Minister (1904) http://books.google.com/books?id=OExBAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
- The Ballad of a Nun (1905)
- The Theatrocrat: a Tragic Play of Church and State, (1905)
- Holiday and other poems, with a note on poetry (1906)
- The Triumph of Mammon (1907) E.G. Richards, London http://books.google.com/books?id=IAMlAAAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
- Mammon and His Message (1908)
- The Testament of John Davidson (1908)
- Fleet Street and other Poems, (1909)
- Contributor to The Yellow Book
He translated:
- Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, (Persian Letters) (1892)
- François CoppéeFrançois CoppéeFrançois Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.-Biography:He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864...
's Pour la couronne, (For the Crown) (1896) - Victor HugoVictor HugoVictor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
's Ruy Blas, (A Queen's Romance) (1904) http://books.google.com/books?id=i04WAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Further reading
- John Davidson, First of the Moderns; A Literary Biography (1995) by John Sloan
- Karl E. Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (1992)
- Princeton University Library, John Davidson Collection, 1879-1945 (bulk 1890-1909) http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead/getEad?eadid=C0215&kw=#series2
External links
- John Davidson profile at Internet Accuracy Project
- Text of Scaramouch in Naxos at La Commedia dell'Arte