Donald Davidson (poet)

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Donald Grady Davidson (August 8, 1893, Campbellsville in Giles County, Tennessee - April 25, 1968, Nashville, Tennessee) was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. He is best known as a founding member of the Nashville circle of poets known as the Fugitives and of an overlapping group, the Southern Agrarians.

[edit] Early life

Davidson was born to William Bluford Davidson, a teacher and school administrator and Elma Wells Davidson, a music and elocution teacher. He received a classical education at Branham and Hughes preparatory school in Spring Hill, Tennessee. He received both his bachelor's (1917) and master's (1922) degrees at Vanderbilt University. He served as a lieutenant in the United States Army during World War I. In June of 1918 he married Theresa Sherrer, a legal scholar and artist.^[1]

Davidson received honorary doctorates from Cumberland University, Washington and Lee University, and Middlebury College.

[edit] Career

While at Vanderbilt, Davidson became associated with the Fugitives, who met to read and criticize each other's verse and later published a review of the same name that launched the literary careers of the poets and critics John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, the poet Laura Riding, and the poet and psychiatrist Merrill Moore.

As a poet Davidson published five volumes: An Outland Piper (1924), The Tall Men (1927), Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (1938), The Long Street (1961), and Collected Poems: 1922-1961 (1966). Davidson enjoyed a national reputation as a poet for some time, in part thanks to the inclusion of his dramatic monologue "Lee in the Mountains" in early editions of the influential college literature textbook Understanding Poetry, whose editors were his former students Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

From 1923 to 1930, Davidson edited the Nashville Tennessean book page, reviewing more than 370 books. The book page was well-respected and syndicated to other newspapers.

Around 1930, Davidson became the leader of the Southern Agrarians and was largely responsible for the publication of the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand. Davidson shared the Agrarians' general distaste for industrial capitalism and its destructive effect on American culture. Davidson's romantic outlook, however, led him to interpret Agrarianism as a straightforward politics of identity. "American" identity had become "characterless and synthetic," he argued in 1933, and he encouraged Americans to embrace their identities as "Rebels, Yankees, Westerners, New Englanders or what you will, bound by ties more generous than abstract institutions can express, rather than citizens of an Americanized nowhere, without family, kin, or home."

In 1931 Davidson began a long association with Middlebury College's Breadloaf School of English, buying a house in Vermont where he did much of his later writing. He taught there every summer until his death. In 1939 his textbook, American Composition and Rhetoric, was published and widely adopted for English courses in American universities.

Perhaps most widely read today is Davidson's two-volume history The Tennessee (1946 and 1948) in the Rivers of America series. The second volume is notable for its critique of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the impact of dam-building and eminent-domain land seizure on local society.

In the 1950s, Davidson wrote a novel, The Big Ballad Jamboree, which went unpublished during his lifetime and undiscovered after his death. It was published posthumously in 1996. He also chaired the pro-segregation group the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government. Davidson, who considered African Americans racially inferior, defended segregation as a social institution developed by white southerners to preserve their culture and identity.

In 1952 his ballad opera, Singin' Billy, with music by Charles F. Bryan, was performed at the Vanderbilt Theater. A volume of essays, Still Rebels, Still Yankees was published in 1957, and a second volume, Southern Writers in the New World, came out in 1958. His service as book page editor for the Nashville Tennessean was commemorated in 1963 with the publication of The Spyglass: Views and Reviews, 1924-1930.

Davidson retired from teaching in 1964, and a comprehensive collection of his poetry, Poems: 1922-61 was published in 1966.^[2][3]

[edit] References