The Testaments of John Davidson


Read by kilpatrick83

(3 stars; 1 reviews)

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. (Summary by kilpatrick83) (4 hr 24 min)

Chapters

The Testament of a Vivisector 13:52 Read by kilpatrick83
The Testament of an Empire-Builder 43:56 Read by kilpatrick83
The Testament of a Prime Minister 56:47 Read by kilpatrick83
Excerpt from The Theatrocrat 3:31 Read by kilpatrick83
The Testament of John Davidson (Part 1) 33:06 Read by kilpatrick83
The Testament of John Davidson (Part 2) 42:28 Read by kilpatrick83
The Testament of John Davidson (Part 3) 22:34 Read by kilpatrick83
The Testament of John Davidson (Part 4) 39:30 Read by kilpatrick83
St. Valentine's Eve (Fleet Street Ecologues) 8:17 Read by kilpatrick83