Blackwell Reference Online

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A group of American poets and critics. The group was based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and published The Fugitive , a bimonthly magazine of poetry and critical essays, from 1922 until 1925. John Crowe R ansom was the dominant figure and the Fugitives’ positions are epitomized in his “Thoughts on the poetic discontent” (1925), an attack on Romanticism and a defense of “the wisdom of irony” which prefigures the central preoccupations of N ew Criticism . The Fugitives were bitterly opposed to the scientific and technological tendencies of modern civilization, and (as their name suggests) pictured themselves as fighting a lonely defensive struggle against it. After the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, when a schoolteacher was convicted of teaching Darwinism in a Tennessee school, the Fugitives turned more and more to a political and cultural defense of the values of the Old South. The group broke up in the mid-1920s as its leaders became more and more preoccupied with economic and political issues, and was subsumed into the S outhern Agrarians . See also N ew Criticism ; R ansom , J ohn C rowe ; S outhern A grarians ; T ate , A llen . 1988 : The Southern Agrarians . 1977 : The Critical Twilight . 1985 : “The Fugitives: Ransom, Davidson, Tate.” . ... log in or subscribe to read full text