The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry

The Fugitive was a magazine published between 1922 and 1928 in Nashville, Tennessee. The collaborators centered in and around Vanderbilt University and included such luminaries as John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Laura Riding. The magazine served as a refiner's crucible for these and other intellectuals who would later influence the Southern Agrarian movement. The themes of the Southern Agrarians appear in poetic form in many of the works included in this fine collection. A reluctance to concede to the spiritual demands of modernity, a distrust of the machine-age, and a wistful remembrance of an almost forgotten Southern sensibility strike the reader with the force of a blow. These poets, while attempting at times to render a specific regional voice, more often than not delve deeper into the "mannishness of man." Their poems are realistic, conscious of the fallenness of the South and those who live in it. Particularly powerful are the poems of Ransom. "The Equilibrists" is perhaps the finest poem written in America about the regrets of lust, sin, and stoically held honor. Ransom's poems about death, and there are many of them included here, evoke the sense of family, loss, and the cycles of the living as surely as do his portraits of decrepit mansions and overgrown gardens. These poets also self-consciously upbraid themselves and each other for the arrogance of youthful intellectual and artistic promise and the vanity of a life whose hopes are pinned on words. The Fugitives were reactionary in their use of the classical tradition. The reader may have to refresh a working knowledge of Ovid and Virgil in order to fully enjoy what is a remarkable collection of poetry.