John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom was the informal leader of the Fugitives. He entered Vanderbilt University at the age of fifteen, and taught at Vanderbilt from 1914 to 1937. Later, he became a professor at Kenyon College where he founded the Kenyon Review.

For his part, Ransom once wrote that those who wanted to build a New South on a northern model had to support southern traditions. In essence, he felt that urbanization caused more problems than it solved. As a poet, Ransom produced the bulk of his poetry while teaching at Vanderbilt. In his best-known poem, Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter, the death of a child was a dramatic moment of fate that strikes us all.

During his years at Vanderbilt, Ransom was one of the first academics in the United States to establish the importance of the poet and critic in English departments which until that time favored instructors who taught in the disciples of philological and historical studies. He is still arguably one of the South’s most influential literary critics and teachers.

Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson received his undergraduate degree and his master’s degree from Vanderbilt. He held four honorary doctorates and taught at Vanderbilt University his entire career. He was also a part of the Southern Agrarian movement and was a key figure in publishing I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays that bemoaned southern industrialization and urbanization.

Davidson shared the Agrarian distaste for industrialization and its effects on American culture. Despite the fact he was a lifelong proponent of segregation, he found the Fugitive gatherings and critiques to be important, because the severity of the discipline made them self-conscious craftsmen, aware of the harsh process of revision. In 1931, Davidson began a long association with Middlebury College in Vermont and was a key member of the Bread Loaf School of English. Today, the annual Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference is one of the most prestigious writing conferences in the United States.

John Orley Allen Tate

Allen Tate began attending Vanderbilt in 1918. He was a classmate with, and roommate of, Robert Penn Warren. At the invitation of Donald Davidson, Tate became a member of the Fugitives. In 1928, Tate received a Guggenheim Fellowship that took him abroad, which gave him the chance to travel to Paris, meet Gertrude Stein, and strike up a friendship with Ernest Hemingway. When he returned to the United States, he embraced agrarianism and contributed to I’ll Take My Stand. Six years later, he wrote a conservative and critical response to Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Tate’s poetry was considered traditional in form. As a fan of agrarianism, his most famous poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead, reflected those feelings. Tate’s only novel, The Fathers, was published in 1938. Within a year, Tate was the poet-in-residence at Princeton. While there, he founded the school’s Creative Writing program. In 1943, he became the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, and in 1944, the editor of the Sewanee Review. Today, the Sewanee Review is America’s oldest literary quarterly and considered to be one of the most prestigious quarterly magazines in the country.

Robert Penn Warren

The youngest member of the Fugitives, Robert Penn Warren, would become its most famous member. Warren entered Vanderbilt in 1921 and began contributing poetry to the Fugitives on a regular basis. In 1925, he graduated from Vanderbilt. Immediately named a Rhodes Scholar, he studied at Oxford. When he returned to the United States, he accepted a teaching position at Vanderbilt, where he taught from 1931 – 1934. While at Vanderbilt, Warren contributed his essay, The Briar Patch, to I’ll Take My Stand. In his essay, he defended agrarianism and racial segregation. Later in his life, he would change his personal and philosophical views.

In 1938, Warren and critic Cleanth Brooks co-wrote the textbook Understanding Poetry, which was widely accepted and used at universities across the United States. In 1942, the two again collaborated and wrote Understanding Fiction, another textbook that was well received and used in colleges. Published in 1939, Night Rider was Warren’s first novel. It was about the tobacco war between independent tobacco growers in Kentucky and large tobacco corporations.

Throughout his career, Warren took a strong interest in Southern history. His novel, All the King’s Men reiterated that theme and won a Pulitzer in 1947. It was about a progressive, yet corrupt, governor that had to confront complex personalities, moral decisions and his own new self-awareness. In 1958, he won another Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his collection of poems, Promises: Poems 1954 – 1956, and yet another Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for Now and Then: Poems 1976 – 1978. In 1967, he won the Bolligen Prize in Poetry. In 1980, Warren received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1981, he received the MacArthur Prize Fellowship. In 1986, he became the first poet laureate of the United States.

Ultimately, the Fugitive Movement gave way to Agrarianism and then to the New Criticism Movement. In the New Criticism Movement, literary works were considered self-contained, devoid of any consideration for the reader’s response, author’s intentions, or historical significance. The New Criticism movement was the dominant mode of literary analysis from the 1920s through the 1940s.

Later, more to come on the evolution of Southern Literature.

INTERVIEWER, BOB YEHLING (BY): First of all, could you tell us a little about your background, in particular how you fell in love with storytelling and the storytelling influences you had growing up?

C ROBIN JORDAN (CRJ): I think first and foremost would be from my parents. They didn’t so much as tell stories as talk about the people they knew when they were younger, events they witnessed, or even things their parents told them. When I was a child, I didn’t care for their stories. I thought they were tedious and boring. Yet, as I got older, I realized that I associate much of my past and my heritage through stories such as those they told.

BY: Storytelling is a huge part of your narrative voice, and your protagonists are good storytellers. What is it about telling a story that gives you so much joy and delight — which is obvious from the way you bring your tales to the page?

CRJ: For the most part, I find a lot of humor in things I don’t think other people see. The eccentricities of the South are fabulous. In Lovelady Road, I wanted those oddities to be out there, to let folks know that while the South has had its checkered past, there are also some really great things in the South. In one chapter of Lovelady Road, I wrote about a squirrel getting into a church during a funeral and the chaos that ensued. I’ve seen birds in churches, why not a squirrel? I want to tell stories that have the reader coming away feeling something for the characters or the storyline. I want to inspire emotion in the reader.

BY: In Lovelady Road, you use the point-of-view of a young girl to convey some pretty serious, often intense adult situations. Why do you feel that we as readers draw so deeply to adult stories told from the eyes of adolescents, in this case a very intelligent and precocious adolescent?

CRJ: As an adolescent, Ruth Anna says some things that most of us have said or wished we said before we grew into guarded adults. From my perspective, it seems most of us are drawn to adolescent stories because the character, the story, or the timeframe reminds us of a time when life was simpler, more innocent.

Click here to read the entire interview.

Thank you, Bob! (see bobyehling.wordpress.com)

As the Industrial Revolution spread, the South began opening up, yet some writers and educators were horrified by the urbanization of the South. Their “revolt” became the roots of the budding Southern literary movement. Those outcries are often traced to the activities of a group known as the Fugitive poets, a group of poets and critics centered at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in the early 1920s.

The Fugitive Movement

The primary members of the group included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren. They wrote critical essays and poetry, and in 1922 founded a small literary magazine, The Fugitive. It is still one of the most influential publications in the history of American letters.

In 1914, two Vanderbilt English professors, John Crowe Ransom and Walter Clyde Curry, started meeting with a group of their students to talk about poetry, literary works, and their outrage that the North consistently perceived the South as populated by backwoods idiots.

For their discussions, they gathered at the apartment of an eccentric supporter by the name of Sidney M. Hirsch. These informal gatherings were the beginnings of the Fugitive poets. For various reasons, they drifted apart during World War I. However, at the conclusion of the War, they reconvened and Donald Davidson, William Yandell Elliott, Stanley Johnson, and Alec B. Stevenson soon joined them. In addition, even younger undergraduates, including Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, became an integral part of the group.

During these gatherings, their goal was to show that a group of southerners could produce important work in the poetry medium. Each participant took a turn reading his poetry. Following the reading, an intense critical discussion would follow. Exquisite or daring poems caused the greatest controversy while conventional poems barely incited comment.

MORE TO COME about the Fugitive Movement and its founding members.