Book Description

As long ago as 1917, Virginia Woolf expressed surprise that anyone as good as John Davidson should 'be so little famous'. Now, at last, criticism has established Davidson as a key figure in the emergence of literary modernism, as the best Scottish poet between Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid, and as an important influence on the younger poets of his day, most notably T. S. Eliot. In this, the first biography of Davidson for more than thirty years, John Sloan presents a wealth of new information about Davidson's life, including his time in London, and the ties which connect him to Sherard's circle, to Wilde, Yeats, and the Rhymers' Club. John Davidson, First of the Moderns explores Davidson's career in London as a penniless author, struggling to reconcile the freedom to experience demanded by the avant-garde artist in the age of the Decadence with the obligations of family, and to combine his ambition for a many-sided reputation as a poet, novelist, and playwright with his need to survive in the commercial rough and tumble of Fleet Street, the theatre, and Paternoster Row. The conditions of authorship, the literary scandals and rows of Fleet Street, and the revelations of the characters involved here provide the literary background to the life of John Davidson. The picture that emerges is not simply of a late Victorian rebel, but of a proto-Modernist who from his recovery from a breakdown in 1896 to his strange disappearance and death in 1909, pioneered a new idiom and subject matter for twentieth-century verse.