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. (Summary by kilpatrick83)
Genre(s): Single author
Language: English
Keyword(s): poetry (1793), materialism (12)
| Section | Chapter | Reader | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Play 01 | The Testament of a Vivisector | kilpatrick83 |
00:13:52 |
| Play 02 | The Testament of an Empire-Builder | kilpatrick83 |
00:43:56 |
| Play 03 | The Testament of a Prime Minister | kilpatrick83 |
00:56:47 |
| Play 04 | Excerpt from The Theatrocrat | kilpatrick83 |
00:03:31 |
| Play 05 | The Testament of John Davidson (Part 1) | kilpatrick83 |
00:33:06 |
| Play 06 | The Testament of John Davidson (Part 2) | kilpatrick83 |
00:42:28 |
| Play 07 | The Testament of John Davidson (Part 3) | kilpatrick83 |
00:22:34 |
| Play 08 | The Testament of John Davidson (Part 4) | kilpatrick83 |
00:39:30 |
| Play 09 | St. Valentine's Eve (Fleet Street Ecologues) | kilpatrick83 |
00:08:17 |