Scotland He was born at
Barrhead,
East Renfrewshire as the son of Alexander Davidson, an
Evangelical Union minister and Helen
née Crocket of Elgin. His strict
Protestant upbringing deeply influenced the type of man and writer he would become.
Harold Herbert Williams writes: "Like
Carlyle he was a protagonist of the actual, for in boyhood he had been trained in the strictest sect of the
Calvinists, and like Carlyle he spent half his life buffeting the universe as a Calvinist without dogma." 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. Davidson also briefly worked in the Public Analysts' Office, from 1870 to 1871. In these employments he developed an interest in science which became an important characteristic of his poetry. 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. The late nineteenth century English novelist
George Gissing read both these volumes in one day in 1893 at the British Museum Library.
Yeats 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 wrote of his emotional dispute with Davidson in
Autobiographies (1955). was followed in turn by a second series of
Fleet Street Eclogues (1896) and by
New Ballads (1897) and
The Last Ballad (1899). She survived him with two sons, Alexander (born 1887) and Menzies (born 1889). A caricature by
Max Beerbohm appeared in
The Chapbook, (1907),
Frank Harris, a member of the Rhymers' Club, described him in 1889:"... a little below middle height, but strongly built with square shoulders and remarkably fine face and head; the features were almost classically 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 Shaw 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.
Legacy Davidson's poetry was a key early influence on important Modernist poets, in particular, his compatriot
Hugh MacDiarmid and
Wallace Stevens.
T.S. Eliot was especially fond of the poem 'Thirty Bob a Week' (In
Ballads and Songs (1894)). Davidson's poem "In the Isle of Dogs", for example, is a clear intertext of later poems such as Eliot's "
The Waste Land" and Stevens' "
The Idea of Order at Key West".
Quotes • "This is an age of
Bovril" ==Works==