John Davidson has been remembered primarily as a minor poet of the 1890s, associated with the Rhymer's Club, and one of Yeats's "Tragic Generation." Yet his poetry has attracted the attention and admiration of such major modern writers as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. In his time he enjoyed fame and some notoriety in England and America with his Fleet Street Eclogues (1893), his Ballads and Songs, which was hailed in 1894 as "the poems of the hour," and "A Ballad of a Nun," said to be the most-quoted poem from Yellow Book magazine. He also holds the distinction of being the first to translate Nietzsche into English, even though his translations (published in periodicals in 1891 and 1893) were from a French translation rather than from the original German. His later book-length, blank-verse testaments propounding a philosophy of scientific materialism were found to be too Nietzschean and dogmatic and lost...