John Davidson

John Davidson 1857-1909, Scottish poet. After teaching in Scotland he went to London. There, struggling with poverty and illness, he wrote Fleet Street Eclogues (1893; Ser. 2, 1896), Ballads and Songs (1894), New Ballads (1897), literary dramas, and novels. He established a small reputation as a lyric poet, but he earned little money. Despairing, he drowned himself in the ocean near Penzance in 1909.

Davidson, John (1857–1909), was a schoolmaster in Scotland before settling in London in 1899, having already published several plays. He contributed to the Yellow Book, and his collection of verse, Fleet Street Eclogues (1893), showed a genuine poetic gift. Between 1901 and 1908 he wrote a series of ‘Testaments’ expounding in blank verse a materialistic and rebellious philosophy, described very fully in the introduction to The Theatrocrat God and Mammon, an intended trilogy of which the first two parts were published in 1907. T. S. Eliot expressed his debt to Davidson's use of ‘dingy urban images’ and colloquial idiom, singling out for particular praise his best-known ballad, the defiant and satiric ‘Thirty Bob a Week’.