The Testaments of John Davidson
John Davidson
Read by kilpatrick83
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 |