Donald Davidson's "Lee in the Mountains" Pt. 1

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Today, while the host works in the mountains, we are featuring the first half of a longer poem by Fugitive poet Donald Davidson, imagining the inner agonies of a Robert E. Lee in retirement. Part 2 tomorrow.

Associated with the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians, poet Donald (Grady) Davidson was born in Tennessee and earned both a BA and an MA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Davidson published five collections of poetry The Outland Piper (1924), The Tall Man (1927), Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (1938), The Long Street: Poems (1961), and Collected Poems: 1922–1961 (1966).

In the 1920s, Davidson co-founded and co-edited the influential journal The Fugitive. His prose writings include an essay in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930); a collection, Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays (1957); and Southern Writers in the Modern World (1958), which he first delivered as a lecture at Mercer University in Georgia. Davidson wrote a two-volume history of Tennessee, The Tennessee Volume One: The Old River: Frontier to Secession (1946) and The Tennessee Volume Two: The New River: Civil War to TVA (1948).

Davidson taught English at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1968. He spent summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.0	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, June 13th, 2004.
0:09.0	Today's poem is by Donald Davidson, one of the fugitive poets or a member of the Southern Agrarian School,
0:17.7	this group of authors who formed at Vanderbilt University around what they believe to be
0:24.4	lost ideals of an antebellum south, that will be more significant in a moment. As you listen to this,
0:34.5	I will be in the mountains of North Carolina and beautiful blowing rock
0:39.3	for a week-long Close Reeds retreat with the hosts of our sister podcast, Close Reeds,
0:47.6	studying Jane Austen's masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice for a week up in the mountains.
0:54.4	Partly to make that trip easier on me and partly to accommodate a longer poem,
1:00.2	this is the first of a two-parter.
1:04.0	Tomorrow you can tune in and hear the second part of this poem by Donald Davidson
1:10.0	called Lee in the Mountains. And it's about and in the second part of this poem by Donald Davidson called Lee in the Mountains.
1:12.7	And it's about and in the voice of an older Robert E. Lee after the Civil War,
1:20.1	when he has been offered and has accepted the post as president of Washington College, now known as Washington and Lee.
1:32.2	And whatever you think of Lee as a person, or rather whatever you think of Lee ideologically,
1:41.8	this is a profound and a moving poem. My own personal connections to
1:49.4	Lee and opinions about Lee have always been a little fraught. My grandmother on my mother's
1:59.3	side always claimed that we were descended from a branch of the Lee family.
2:04.2	It was her maiden name.
2:05.9	While on my father's side, there are plenty of people who could very well have been the property of Robert Healy.
2:13.9	So that generational tension has never offered to resolve itself easily.
2:21.3	And maybe that's as it should be.
	...

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