Selected Poems and Prose of John Davidson

The first Selected Poems of John Davidson for 30 years, this new selection brings together the best of his work both from the 1890s and his later materialist phase. Davidson has lately been reassessed, and he is now generally recognized to be a poet of major status, a precursor of the modernist movement, and the best Scottish poet between Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid. This edition demonstrates the quality and breadth of Davidson’s work, and also contains selections from his letters and prose writings, which shed new light on his life and aims as a poet. Widely admired as an early modern, Davidson’s fascination with urban experience and the new technologies supplied a precedent for the Modernist movement. John Sloan’s edition brings together the popular poems of the 1890s such as ‘In Romney Marsh’, ‘London’ and ‘Thirty Bob a Week’, and the ambitious and highly celebrated poems of his later years such as ‘The Crystal Palace’ and ‘London Bridge’, with their ironic observations of the London crowds. Also included are “The Thames Embankmente’ with its materialistic blending of urban and natural landscape, and the moving and scientific "Snow’.