The Testaments of John Davidson

The oft-maligned Testaments of John Davidson work as a sublime, psychopathic post-Nietzchean (Zarathustra was merely Davidson's springboard into a deeper transcendence) prologue to his impending suicide in 1909. After a warmly receptive life of ballad making and the like (benevolent pedagogy and inclusion in the chintzy Rhymer's Club), a by then poverty-stricken, neglected Davidson could sharpen his mind toward the completion of a more pristine art. Subsequently, we are given the meanest gap between symbolism and modernism (an expressionistic, Schopenhauerian materialist monism in monologic profile a la Browning, a demented Kipling) on record, a Marlowe-level blank verse masterwork of the now, warping into a demented, ironically (intended or not, certainly unfunded and ignored by anyone in charge) nationalist individualism, a system of self-deification, the final scream of a decaying genius.

By : John Davidson (1857 - 1909)

01 - The Testament of a Vivisector 02 - The Testament of an Empire-Builder 03 - The Testament of a Prime Minister 04 - Excerpt from The Theatrocrat 05 - The Testament of John Davidson (Part 1) 06 - The Testament of John Davidson (Part 2) 07 - The Testament of John Davidson (Part 3) 08 - The Testament of John Davidson (Part 4) 09 - St. Valentine's Eve (Fleet Street Ecologues)