Residence Vermont, U.S. Education Vanderbilt University Role Poet | Name Donald Davidson Alma mater Vanderbilt University | |
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Full Name Donald Grady Davidson Born August 8, 1893 Giles County, Tennessee, U.S. Occupation Poet, college professor Died April 25, 1968, Nashville, Tennessee, United States Parents Elma Wells Davidson, William Bluford Davidson Books The Tennessee, The Big Ballad Jamboree, Southern Writers in the Mode, The Spyglass: Views an, Still Rebels - Still Yank Similar People Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Nelson Lytle, John Donald Wade, Robert Penn Warren | ||
Donald Grady Davidson (August 8, 1893 – April 25, 1968) was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. He is best known as a founding member of the Nashville, Tennessee circle of poets known as the Fugitives and of an overlapping group, the Southern Agrarians.
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Biography
Davidson was born in Campbellsville in Giles County, Tennessee, 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 Military Academy, a preparatory school in Spring Hill, Tennessee. He earned both his bachelor's (1917) and master's (1922) degrees at Vanderbilt University. He later received honorary doctorates from Cumberland University, Washington and Lee University, and Middlebury College. He served as a lieutenant in the United States Army during World War I. In June 1918, he married Theresa Sherrer, a legal scholar and artist. While at Vanderbilt, Davidson became associated with the Fugitives, who met to read and criticize each other's verse. Later, they founded a review of the same name, which 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. He enjoyed a national reputation as a poet, in part due to the inclusion of his dramatic monologue, "Lee in the Mountains", in early editions of the influential college literature textbook Understanding Poetry. Its editors were his former students Warren and Cleanth Brooks. From 1923 to 1930, Davidson reviewed books and edited the Nashville Tennessean book page, where he assessed more than 370 books. The book page was well respected and syndicated to other newspapers.
Around 1930, Davidson began his association with the Southern Agrarians. He was chiefly responsible for the decision of the group to write essays, published as the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand. Davidson shared the Agrarians' 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. 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." He was in favor of segregation.
In 1931, Davidson began a long association with Middlebury College's Breadloaf School of English. He bought a house in Vermont where he did much of his later writing. He taught at the Breadloaf School 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 (TVA) and the impact of its dam-building and eminent domain land seizure on local society. In 1952 his ballad opera, Singin' Billy, with music by Charles F. Bryan, was performed at the Vanderbilt Theater. His work 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. A comprehensive collection of his poetry, Poems: 1922–61, was published in 1966. He died, aged 74, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Segregationist political activism
Davidson was a proponent of racial segregation and racial inequality. In an essay defending segregation in the Sewannee review, described by Paul V. Murphy as his major work on the topic, he wrote:
The white South denies the Negro equal participation in society, not only because it does not consider him entitled to equality, but because it is certain that social mingling would lead to biological mingling, which it is determined to prevent, both for any given contemporary generation and for its posterity.
Davidson supported the 1948 presidential candidacy of Strom Thurmond, who was running as a Dixiecrat in opposition to President Harry Truman's civil rights proposals. He joined the Tennesse States' Rights Committee in 1950, and became the chairman of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government (TFCG), the local analogue of the White Citizens Councils, at its founding in 1955. Under his leadership, TFCG led the failed effort to oppose the desegregation of Nashville's public schools. Davidson warned of if black students attended, "The capital city of Tennessee would become an uneasy island of integration surrounded by a tumultuous ocean of protest and discontent."