The major themes of Donald Davidson's poetry—tradition, the value of one's heritage, the importance of the past to the present—appear most forcefully in the volume The Tall Men, published in 1927, and the poem "Lee in the Mountains," written in 1934 when Davidson was devoting much energy to the cause of Agrarianism. His most effective treatment of these themes prior to The Tall Men is, surprisingly, in a group of poems written in the summer of 1922, when Davidson corresponded frequently with Allen Tate about the possibilities of the new "modernism" in poetry. These poems, which Davidson and Tate refer to as the "Pan" series—individually entitled "Dryad," "Naiad," "Twilight Excursion," and "Corymba"—are perhaps Davidson's most modern poems in technique, showing particularly his attempts to achieve incongruity and startling contrasts in diction.

While some critics have acknowledged the effectiveness of Davidson's attack on modern society in these "Pan...