Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

When Vanderbilt poet – professors John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson – along with precocious undergraduate Allen Tate – launched a literary magazine called The Fugitive in 1922, it was not their intent to start a new regional movement in American letters. In fact, the group (soon to include the younger Robert Penn Warren) that would come to be known as the Fugitives largely sought to define itself against advocates of a “Southern” literature and confined their private discussions to aesthetic questions, concerning themselves not with regional identity but with the nature and proper practice of poetry. Rather than praise or criticize Southern culture, they debated the merits of American expatriate T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and the question of literary modernism. By the end of the decade, however, they had – to varying degrees – become more conscious of and defensive about their regional identity, spurred by both a deeper sense of the South's alienation from the rest of the United States and a growing skepticism about the values of modern Western culture. Accordingly, the three elder writers led Warren and eight other Southern intellectuals (the “Twelve Southerners”) in penning I ' ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930) and henceforth were also associated with the cultural rather than literary criticism of the group that became known as ... log in or subscribe to read full text