Find A Poet, Learn They Were a Racist

Jun 14, 2025

Flipping through the Library of America 20th-century poetry anthology led me to a poem called "Sanctuary" by Donald Davidson, a poet whose name was new to me. It didn't wow me but I was intrigued enough to learn a bit more. I read the general biography at the Poetry Foundation website, which told me he was a poet of the South, early 20th century. I skipped the rest of the bio and grabbed a poem from the same site at random, his "Teach Me", from 1922:

Teach me, old World, your passion of slow change,
Your calm of stars, watching the turn of earth,
Patient of man, and never thinking strange
The mad red crash of each new system’s birth.

Having cosmic indifference on the brain, my antenna wiggled and wriggled a bit: is this the same distance of the universe described by a Kierkegaard or a Nietzsche, or a Silano or a CES Wood, but here interpreted as patience (patience of man)?

And two great phrases: passion of slow change and calm of stars. Cool.

Hewing near perfectly to a sonnet form, I'm not sure that the subsequent quatrains and closing couplet come off as well as the first stanza. But the idea continues to be elaborated, that there is something to be taught by the world, by its example of distance (as patience). It's moving, and it is pushed further: the world has a form of "perfectness" other than anything developed by humanity.

In fact, humanity's inability to adequately reckon with its place in the world is a vulnerability, as seen in this third stanza:

Teach me, old World, not as vain men have taught,
—Unpatient song, nor words of hollow brass,
Nor men’s dismay whose powerfullest thought
Is woe that they and worlds alike must pass.

⊕ It's probably worth mentioning that this Donald Davidson (1893-1968) is not the philosopher Donald Davidson (1917-2003).

I finished the poem, maybe read it again, but then started thinking: what kind of southern poet was Davidson?

So I re-read the bio more closely and found he was a member of the Southern Agrarian movement. I'm no expert but I know enough to know that dominant strains of that movement reflected some of the less desirable strains of Southern thought during this period. The Wikipedia page for the movement describes criticism of their manifesto as follows:

I'll Take My Stand was criticized at the time, and since, as a reactionary and romanticized defense of the Old South and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. It ignored slavery and denounced "progress", for example, and some critics considered it to be moved by nostalgia.

Davidson was a co-founder of The Fugitive, a journal of the movement, and he wrote essays, poetry, fiction, even an opera libretto. Looking at the names of some of his work, keeping in mind his affiliation with the movement, it was hard not to wonder about his views on race.

And boy, did Wikipedia come through on that, too. Can we first appreciate the bluntness of the Wikipedia entry:

Davidson was a proponent of racial segregation and racial inequality.

The section is brief but damning: this was a guy who did not just hold deeply racist views, which of course would already be problematic, but he openly articulated them and advocated for their application.

As it all came together, I sighed -- deeply. After I read "Teach Me," I didn't think I had found my new favorite poem or anything, but I was at least curious in exploring this guy's work a bit. And that's always a fun feeling: finding a secret door in a video game; stumbling on a unfathomably stacked record store in the middle of nowhere.

Of course he had to turn out to be a straight-up racist.

Sometimes, you open that door and it's not lootpacks, or a straight shot to sidequests that aren't marked on any map.

Sometimes, it's a room full of demons with bloodlust on their minds and you in their line of sight and how are you out of ammo right now?!?

Sometimes, that bookstore in the middle of nowhere is just a dud, neither utopia or hellscape, just way too many shelves of westerns and a whole section devoted to Nora Roberts. Or sometimes, that dud bookstore has a backroom of records, well-cared for and not yet picked over to crumbs.

Sometimes the diner that appears on the horizon, like an oasis, winds up having a big confederate flag on the wall of its main room. It might have the best eggs benedict you've ever had in your life, or it might serve the dish in an ocean of hollandaise, transforming the eating and the morning and maybe your whole life for a while into a soggy, greasy mess.

A quote from the other Donald Davidson - the philosopher, not the racist poet of the South - presented without comment:

There is no secret about the nature of the evidence we use to decide what other people think: we observe their acts, read their letters, study their expressions, listen to their words, learn their histories, and note their relations to society. How we are able to assemble such material into a convincing picture of a mind is another matter; we know how to do it without necessarily knowing how we do it.'^[1]