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THE FUGITIVE GROUP
LOUISE COWAN
THE FUGITIVE GROUP
A LITERARY HISTORY
This book is a gift to the library by
Dr.Pasupuleti Gopala Krishnayya,
President, Krishnayya's News
Service, New York City, as part of a
collection of American books given
ttlta.
Louisiana
State University Press
Baton Rouge, La.
To Bainard
Copyright 1959 by Louisiana State University Press
Library of Congress Catalogue Card No.: 59-14394
Manufactured in the United States of America
by J. H. Furst Company, Baltimore, Maryland
Designed by William Nicoll
WldPM^
PREFACE
Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dol
This line from Virgil was Allen Tate's response to an
recounting of the story told here. And unutterably cruel it seems
to fashion out of the early lives of living men a history that by its
very nature must be painful to its subjects. My only excuse for
"renewing the griefs" and recalling the joys is the conviction
that the story of the Fugitive group is not a mere record of an
interesting coterie but a kind of parable demonstrating the opera-
tions of poetry (like the operations of grace) among mortal men.
And the parable seems to mean something like this: Wherever the
art of poetry is practiced humbly and perseverantly, for its own
sake, by " two or three gathered together "if they are able to trust
and to love each other the Muse will reveal her true nature and
her role in human affairs. If I have interpreted the parable accu-
rately, then the importance of the Fugitive group apprenticeship
cannot be overestimated. And it is because of the increasing rarity
vi Preface
of this sort of association in modern letters, even on a small scale,
that I have been so bold as to attempt the story of an epoch in the
lives of men who have gone on to quite separate careers.
The letters and documents available for this study permitted
an accuracy of chronology and a volume of content that could not
have been transmitted by the memories of any number of the Fugi-
tives; nonetheless, at times, one must realize, their very authority
is misleading. Any written work, particularly by a literary man,
is in a sense a creation, expressing a single aspect of an experience;
and, specifically, a letter is a private communication with private
references, so that its displayed effect may run counter to what is
public truth. Some of Robert Penn Warren's comments on Fugi-
tive meetings, for instance, though otherwise enlightening, throw
more shade than light on the gatherings he remembers now as
happy occasions. Laura Riding's brilliantly written letters have
not been quoted in this study because of her belief that their use
would lend a sense of wholeness to a relationship that was for her
essentially partial, near the beginning of her literary career. Each
of the Fugitives, like all men, would have some part of the past
undone. Allen Tate feels that his behavior toward Dr. Edwin
Mims reflected little honor upon himself; and, from the vantage
of a long and warm friendship with John Crowe Ransom, he views
with contrition the high spirits that led him into a minor public
controversy long since settled with his friend and fellow-Fugitive.
For his part, Ransom considers much of his prose writing during
the period of The Fugitive pretentious and not wholly submissive
to its subjects. These men and the others have permitted the use
of their letters only out of a deep respect for the actual and an
ingrained habit of courtesy. In turn, their chronicler would here
render all the Fugitives, both living and dead, the courtesy of an
apology that apology due from the possessor of a clumsy hand
that, having picked up a few crumbs, rearranges them laboriously
and passes them off as a loaf of bread.
This study began as a dissertation, a work to which the reader
is directed for a detailed listing of the unpublished documents
Preface vii
pertaining to the Fugitives. 1 The files of The Fugitive itself and
the official Fugitive correspondence, in the possession of Donald
Davidson and held for him by the Joint University Libraries in
Nashville, furnished the framework of the account. For the early
background of the Fugitives (before they became the Fugitives, of
course), I consulted the Vanderbilt University Registrar's records,
the University catalogs, the volumes of the Vanderbilt Alumnus,
and the Vanderbilt student publications (The Commodore, The
Hustler, The Jade, and The Observer). Professor Mims's History
of Vanderbilt University 2 was an invaluable aid. The life and
spirit of the Fugitive movement were revealed tome chiefly through
the correspondence (1922-1928) of Davidson and Tate, the de-
tailed and frequent letters between the two providing a rich sense
of the men and the times. Ransom's letters to Tate have also held
an inestimable wealth and, though fewer, the letters of Warren
to both Tate and Davidson have been helpful, as have the records
and correspondence of Alec B. Stevenson, official treasurer of the
group, and a few letters from various other sources. Conversations
with most of the living Fugitives as well as with their friends and
members of their families 3 have helped fill in the very intricate
chronology of sixteen poets and have given some notion of those
small and seemingly unimportant details that indicate character
and personality. The reader is referred to two excellent memoirs
of the group; one, written in 1942 by Tate, 4 I have relied upon
heavily; the other, written in 1958 by Davidson 5 and appearing
*"The Fugitive: A Critical History," Vanderbilt University, 1953.
8 Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1940.
8 For their kindness in interviews and conversations I am grateful to Donald
Davidson, Allen Tate, Alec B. Stevenson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn
Warren, Jesse Wills, Walter Clyde Curry, William Frierson, Sidney Mttron-
Hirsch, Merrill Moore, Alfred Starr, Edwin Mims, Mrs. James Frank, Mrs. Stanley
Johnson, Ellene Ransom, Isabel Howell, Mrs. Brainerd Cheney, Caroline Gordon,
Theresa Sherrer Davidson, and Mrs. Eric Bell.
4 "The Fugitive 1922-1925: A Personal Recollection Twenty Years After,"
the Princeton University Library Chronicle, III, No. 3 (April, 1942), 75-84.
6 " The Thankless Muse and Her Fugitive Poets," Southern Writers in the
Modern World (Athens: the University of Georgia Press, 1958), 1-30.
viii Preface
after my study was completed, I referred to a few times in the
final revisions of this work.
I am grateful to Dr. A. F. Kuhlman and to Miss Clara Mae
Brown of the Joint University Libraries for many special courtesies
during the course of my research and to the Princeton University
Library, where Tate's correspondence is housed. A research grant
given me by Texas Christian University in the summer of 1956
aided me in preparing my manuscript for publication. Randall
Stewart's kind invitation to the Fugitive Reunion in the spring
of 1956 and the generosity of Louis D. Rubin, Jr., the American
Studies Association, and the Rockefeller Foundation enabled me
to recreate more firmly in my own mind the atmosphere of a
meeting of the Fugitive group. 6
My thanks are due Richmond Groom Beatty, Rob Roy Purdy,
Randall Stewart, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Jean Holloway for
reading the manuscript and making valuable suggestions. My sister,
Doris Shillingburg, helped me with revisions at a time when it
seemed that someone's eyes other than mine would have to see
the task completed. Mary Trippet gave generous time in revising,
typing, and proofreading. The extent of my husband's help is
impossible to assess, but I record here my considerable indebtedness
to him.
LOUISE COWAN
6 For a record of the conversation at this meeting, see Fugitives' Reunion,
Rob Roy Purdy, ed. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1959).
inwftjf^^
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
THE AUTHOR MAKES grateful acknowledgment
of the following materials used in this book:
For unpublished letters and other documents:
Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Alec B. Steven-
son, Robert Penn Warren, Jesse Wills, William Yandell Elliott, Louis
Untermeyer, Rinehart and Company, Inc., Publishers, on behalf of the
Hervey Allen Estate, and LeRoy A. Percy, Executor, on behalf of the
William Alexander Percy Estate.
For photographs:
Robert McGaw, Publicity Director, Vanderbilt University, the photo-
graph of Kissam Hall and the portrait of Davidson; Isabel! Howell, the
portraits of Tate, Warren, and Moore; Donald Davidson, the MS. of
"Corymba"; The Fugitive Collection, the portrait of Ransom, the
Nashville Tennessean group picture, and the MS. of " Nuptials "; Rob
Roy Purdy, the photographs of the Fugitives taken during the Fugitive
Reunion.
IX
x Acknowledgment
For material reprinted from published volumes:
From Poems about God, by John Crowe Ransom (Copyright, 1919,
by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., Copyright, 1947, by John Crowe
Ransom. By permission of the publishers.)
From Professor, by Stanley Johnson (Copyright, 1925, by Harcourt,
Brace and Company, Inc. By permission of the publishers.)
From An Outland Piper, by Donald Davidson (Copyright, 1924
and 1952, by Donald Davidson. By permission of the author.)
From Southern Writers in the Modern World, by Donald Davidson
(Copyright, 1958, by the University of Georgia Press. By permission
of the publishers.)
From The Princeton University Library Chronicle (Copyright, 1924,
by Princeton University. By permission of William S. Dix, Librarian.)
From The Fugitive (Copyright 1922-1925, by the Fugitive Pub-
lishing Company. By permission of the group.)
A portion of this book appeared as an essay in Shenandoah,
Summer, 1955.
ftlftftlftj^^
CONTENTS
v Preface
ix Acknowledgment
xv Introduction
3 i The Discursive Stage: 1903-1916
23 ii Disruption, Reassembly,
and the Turn to Poetry: 1917-1921
43 in The Birth of The Fugitive:
Spring, 1922
63 iv The Lines Drawn within the Group:
Summer and Fall, 1922
xi
xii Contents
95 v Controversy The Results of
Commitment: 1923
141 vi The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924
189 vn The End of The Fugitive: 1925
222 vin Toward Understanding-
The Fugitive Anthology and the Beginnings
of Agrarianism: 1926-1928
258 Appendix: Contents of The Fugitive
269 Index
ftjftjRjRjf^^
ILLUSTRATIONS
facing
page
Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, and Merrill Moore 72
The Fugitive Group Assembled for the Fugitive Reunion 73
Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom 104
The Five Chief Fugitives 105
The Nashville Tennessean Featuring the Fugitive Poets 136
Kissam Hall, Headquarters for Many of the Fugitives 137
Typescript of Davidson's " Corymba " 168
Tate's Manuscript of " Nuptials " 169
xiii
lftif*^
INTRODUCTION
THE NASHVILLE POETS who published the little
magazine The Fugitive during the early half of the 1920*5 have the
distinction of being the inaugurators of the Southern literary renais-
sance. Among these writers were four who must be considered at
once the most germinal and articulate literary men to come out of
the South John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate,
and Robert Penn Warren. Unlike many other Southern writers
who have maintained a deliberate inarticulateness in literary theory
William Faulkner, for instance these four have developed a
literary criticism, a social philosophy, and even an ontology on
which an increasing number of writers are building. Because
these same men also played major roles in another, more contro-
versial group the Agrarians the general literary public has tended
to merge the two movements, not entirely without justification.
Before the critic can admit their essential unity, however, he must
xv
xvi Introduction
at least acknowledge their existential distinctness and recognize
their separate accomplishments.
The Fugitives were a quite tangible body of sixteen poets 1 who,
having no particular program, met frequently from 1915 to 1928
for the purpose of reading and discussing their own work. The
Agrarians were twelve scholars of various disciplines 2 who, from
about 1928 to 1935, were united by common principle rather than
contiguity and whose intercommunications were conducted, for the
most part, through letters and essays. The first group published
nineteen issues of The Fugitive (1922-1925), a journal devoted
almost exclusively to poetry, whereas the second compiled I'll
Take My Stand (1930), an anthology attacking industrialism and
its basic dogma, the belief in the perfectibility of man through
secular progress.
But though technically the groups were distinctone being
purely literary and the other social and religious and only indirectly
literary they had in fact an important connection in the four men
already mentioned, whose ideas generated and gave form to the
Agrarian convictions. The formulation of these ideas occurred
rather suddenly, just after the suspension of The Fugitive and a
while before the publication of I'll Take My Stand. It was during
this brief period that the implications of their own poetry became
apparent to Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren. Thus the first
group experience, a creative adventure into the realm of intuitive
knowledge, gave rise to the critical and speculative activity of
the second.
In this joint creative adventure not only die four major Fugitive
poets but the others as well were important participants. The
enterprise was given solidity by the fact that persons of unlike
1 John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren,
Merrill Moore, Laura Riding, Jesse Wills, Alec B. Stevenson, Walter Clyde
Curry, Stanley Johnson, Sidney Mttron Hirsch, James Frank, William Yandell
Elliott, William Frierson, Ridley Wills, and Alfred Starr.
1 John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren,
Andrew Lytle, Stark Young, John Gould Fletcher, Frank Lawrence Owsley, Lyle
Lanier, H. C. Nixon, John Donald Wade, Henry Blue Kline.
Introduction xvii
minds and dissimilar gifts were committed to the composition of
poems. Thus, members of the Fugitive circle came to view poetry
as having a universal character and to assume that all educated men
not merely a select few should be interested in reading and writ-
ing verse. But though the other Fugitives worked seriously at poetry
and contributed to the group experience, in the end they turned
aside from the commitment to letters made by Ransom, Davidson,
Tate, and Warren. Merrill Moore, the most prolific (and in some
ways the most naturally talented) poet among the Fugitives, con-
tinued until his recent death to write distinguished verse that was
for him primarily an avocation, though certainly a seriously pur-
sued one. But as his biographer points out, Moore's work is funda-
mentally at odds with the other Fugitive poetry. 3 Laura Riding,
another member who has become an established poet, had little
more than a nominal relationship with the group. The other
members have made their lasting contribution in fields outside
poetry and criticism; Sidney Hirsch, a student of the occult; James
Frank, scholarly merchant; Walter Clyde Curry, the Chaucer and
Milton scholar; William Yandell Elliott, the political scientist;
William Frierson, an authority on French literature; Alec Steven-
son, Jesse Wills, and Alfred Starr, financiers; Stanley Johnson,
administrative educator and novelist; Ridley Wills, journalist and
novelist. These twelve have produced numerous volumes but none
in the cultural criticism and formal literary analysis which have
come to be known as dominant Fugitive methods. They have held
varying degrees of aversion to the reactionary implications of tradi-
tionalism; at least, none of them followed the trail into Agrarianism
which, at the time, Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren were
blazing.
In a critical evaluation of the Fugitive movement, then, it is
to the work of the four poets who were also Agrarians that one
turns, since Ransom, Davidson, and Tate were, in Tate's words,
the " final causes " of the movement 4 and Warren was in many
Henry W. Wells, Poet and Psychiatrist (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1955), 45-
* Unpublished letter to Davidson, March 7, 1927.
xviii Introduction
senses its product. After die short storm provoked by Agrarianism
these Fugitive-Agrarians went their individual ways in the pro-
fession of letters, each provided with various engagements in re-
ligion, philosophy, history, and literature sufficient to sustain him
alone; the group activity was effectively over. But these four leaders
were to show an astonishing versatility and productivity, publishing
among them something over fifty volumes of poetry, criticism, his-
tory, biography, fiction, and textbooks.
Ransom's dry and exceptionally civilized poetry was already
mature during the life of The fugitive-, since then he has dis-
tinguished himself also in criticism, editing, and aesthetics. His
is recognized as one of the original styles in American and English
letters, both in poetry and prose. Editor of The Kenyan Review
since 1939 and a professor at Kenyon College after he left Vandcr-
bilt in 1937, his influence on the contemporary literary scene has
been vast. He continues to produce literary essays, following the
neo-Kantian bent which has been present in all his writings and
which has led him to diverge somewhat from the direction of
Agrarianism.
Next to Ransom, Davidson was nearest maturity when the
magazine expired, though his best poetry has come after the
twenties, as has his searching historical method in the study of
literature (as opposed to either the purely critical or the sociological
approaches). The relation of literature to a culture is his con-
tinuing subject in most of his prose writings. In poetry, since it is
the oral and lyric tradition that he explores, as distinct from the
more highly favored ironic and paradoxical style within which the
other poet-critics of this school have worked, his writing has never
received the critical attention it deserves. Davidson has remained
at Vanderbilt from the Fugitive days on and teaches at Bread Loaf
School of English every summer.
Allen Tate has been by turns college professor, editor, and
free-lance writer, having spent many years as a critical reviewer
as he perfected his brilliant poetic style. For two years (1944-
1946) he edited The Sewanee Review. Tate's biographies and his
Introduction xix
one carefully written novel have fallen into an ill-deserved neglect,
but his critical essays continue to be reprinted and cited perhaps
as often as those of any other critic in America; and his poetry is
acknowledged to be among the best in modern letters. Now at the
University of Minnesota, Tate is writing both criticism and poetry
in which are embodied the full statement of themes he has been
pursuing from the beginning of his career.
Though Robert Penn Warren's poetry was farthest of the four
from maturity during the issuance of The Fugitive (he was the
youngest of the group), he went on in the years after Agrarianism
to intensive work in poetry and in fiction, as well as to an applica-
tion of criticism to pedagogy. With Cleanth Brooks, Warren has
published textbooks that disseminate not only to college students
but to their teachers the methods of what has been called " the new
criticism/' With Brooks also he edited for the seven years of its
existence (1935-1942) The Southern Review, a literary journal
that has set the pattern for excellence in America.
In poetry, in fiction, and in literary criticism, these men have
taken their places among the most noted writers today in English.
Their greatest impact, however, has been in establishing a profes-
sion of letters, as much by their work in editing and setting policies
for literary journals as by transforming the study of literature in
the universities, their texts and their own teaching demonstrating
the necessity of its being approached as an important study in its
own right. Genuine men of letters, in that they pursue their craft
on many fronts at once and in that they allow their critical ideas
to interact with their creative imaginations, they are a group un-
matched in American literature. And though there is no real
theological, epistemological, or even aesthetic agreement among
these four today (and their later careers have been consistent
unfoldings of their earlier positions), they have in common an
approach to literature and an assumption about the literary artist's
function that gives them the force and intensity of a school.
Behind their strength and effectiveness as men of letters lies
their own experience in poetry, an experience gained in subjection
XX
Introduction
not to ideas and theories, but to language and form. One can
easily discern on the surface of their poems various sorts of simi-
larities. But there is a deeper kinship between them, one which
generates the parallels of irony, of an earthy yet learned language,
and of religious attitude; it lies in the element basic to their work
and to a varying degree present in the work of the other Fugitives.
It is an element that might justifiably be called unique in American
literature. This element which sets apart the poetry of the Fugi-
tive group in modern letters is its embodiment of the fundamental
beliefs of the society out of which it came.
John Crowe Ransom's poetry, for instance, is not, like T. S.
Eliot's, a vision of the deficiencies of his culture, nor like Hart
Crane's, a celebration of its potentialities; neither is it, like Robert
Frost's, a symbolic use of particularities in a local scene; it is instead
a dramatization of the basic qualities of mind and heart in the
people for whom Ransom has acted as spokesman. This is not to
say, certainly, that Ransom has spoken for the Southern people in
the way they would speak for themselves. They would not, indeed,
see themselves as inhabiting a world " perilous and beautiful," in
a " torture of equilibrium." They would not admit that they look
upon death with the detachment as well as the sentiment exhibited
in "Here Lies a Lady," "Bells for John Whitcside's Daughter,"
or "Dead Boy." Nor would they recognize themselves in the
figures of "Captain Carpenter," "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son,"
Jane Sneed, or John Black. But, as R. G. Collingwood has written,
" No community altogether knows its own heart "; r> and for the
past fifty years the Southern heart has been almost a complete
stranger to the Southern head. Ransom has not, therefore, pre-
sented the mass shibboleths in the mass language. On the contrary,
he has based his verse on the values by which the South has lived,
relating them to a whole intellectual tradition, which the section
may be unconscious it has inherited, and ordering them into a
tight and meticulous vision of reality. His is the poetry of an intel-
ligent and passionate man, who, not in rebellion against the funda-
5 The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 336.
Introduction xxi
mental beliefs of his society, has consequently been free to address
himself chiefly to the problem of form and language without in-
curring the danger of isolation.
Ransom may be profitably chosen to demonstrate the basic
Fugitive quality because his writing does not at first appear to be
the expression of a society but of a pungent and rare personality.
It is obviously work with an individual flavor and character; it is
obviously not "local color" writing; its subjects are not often
Southern; yet it is as unmistakably an expression of Southern society
as the Divine Comedy was of thirteenth-century Italy or Hamlet
was of Elizabethan England.
T. S. Eliot has written that the poet cannot embody values in
his work until he has experienced them communally. 6 It is just
such a communal sacrament of which Mr. Eliot himself has been
deprived; and it is this quality in the work of the Fugitives, however
major or minor their individual achievements may turn out to be,
that binds them together into a genuine school of poets. It is im-
portant that they be recognized as, in Allen Tate's words, "an
intensive and historical group as opposed to the eclectic and cos-
mopolitan groups that flourished in the East." 7 The "unity of
feeling " that pervaded the Fugitives (quite different from a unity
of theory such as most schools of poetry have had since the seven-
teenth century) Tate ascribes to a " common historical myth."
What kind of society was it that provided the Fugitives with
their dominant myth? For one thing, it was peopled by folk who
had a great respect for learning; indeed, the South thought of
itself as a continuation of the main stream of classical humanism.
Middle Tennessee was particularly rich in preparatory schools; so
it is not strange that, having been brought up in this region, most
of the men who were to be the Fugitives received their preparatory
education in academies that gave them early in life an uncommon
" The Social Function of Poetry," in R. W. StaUman (ed.), Critics and
Essays in Criticism (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1949), 108.
''"The Fugitive 1922-1925: A Personal Recollection Twenty Years After,"
The Princeton University Library Chronicle, III, No. 3 (April, 1942), 83.
xxii Introduction
acquaintance with the Latin and Greek classics and so developed
their sense of the presence and relevance of the past.
The Southern society provided for the Fugitives, too, a code of
manners and morals, with its underlying gentilesse that blend of
gentility and spirit, honor and humility, sympathy and humor that
made for gracious friendships and called forth intimate though
not introspective conversation. Without this courtesy, the long
association of men of such diverse talent could not have persevered,
nor could a practice of honest criticism have survived more than a
few meetings. But there are two more important contributions the
South made to the Fugitives, enormously happy gifts for poets. One
is a spoken language, which with its easiness upon the tongue, its
fine metaphorical flair, its Anglo-Saxon pungency, was the birth-
right of the Fugitives; they did not have to "invent" their lan-
guage. The other is a sense of form, which their poetry possesses
to a high degree. It is this true allegory (a term for their method
which is preferable to the nineteenth-century term symbolism,
tinged as it is with Romantic transcendentalism) that has provided
the basic impetus of their poetry and their understanding of litera-
ture. The allegorical method of the Fugitives is the result of an
analogical view of the universe, which for the Southerner is a
hanger-on (as are so many other of his distinctive traits) from the
major European tradition, formed in the Middle Ages.
But, amidst the contending " New South " and " Old South "
philosophies, both gross and naive oversimplifications, the true
Southern values could have been discerned only by poets, dedi-
cated to their craft. In an article for The Bookman, in 1929 Allen
Tate described the peculiar character of the Fugitive poets by
saying that they began with " open minds ":
They were willing to draw upon all the resources of poetry that
they knew, for it was obvious that their sectionalism, if it existed, and
their nationalism, if that existed, would take care of themselves. There
was no attempt to force the materials at hand into an easy significance
(the mistake of the South Carolina poets). Fugitive poetry turned out
to be profoundly sectional in that it was supported by the prejudices,
Introduction xxiii
feelings, values, into which the poets were born. Because the approach
of the Fugitives to their art was the normal one, and because the normal
attitude has been absent in America for several generations, the history
of the Fugitive group is not an unprofitable study. 8
The study of the group can best be approached through a focus
upon the magazine which was an objectification of these formative
years. Without The Fugitive, no doubt the group would have con-
tinued to meet and converse, and no doubt the most serious poets
among them would have published their poetry in other journals.
But the necessity of fulfilling an obligation to the outside world,
of gathering material into shape so that the group would not be put
to shame, of making editorial comments and conducting literary
contests these tasks precipitated quarrels, arguments, and experi-
ments that caused a group of talented men to interact upon each
other and, finally, to share in an experience of reality which has
provided one of the major insights in modern literature.
The group and the magazine, then, these are the concerns of
this study. Beginning with the first appearance of the group at
Vanderbilt University in the early 1900*5, this account continues on
through the suspension of the magazine to the publication of Fugi-
tives: An Anthology, in 1928, since that volume was a landmark
pointing in two directions: backward into the Fugitive years,
forward to the Agrarian ones. Other volumes will be written con-
cerning the mature work of the individual Fugitives; this attempts
to record and interpret their formative years.
* " American Poetry since 1920," The Bookman, LXVIII (January, 1929),
504.
THE FUGITIVE GROUP
CHAPTER ONE
J\ifW
THE
DISCURSIVE STAGE:
1903-1916
THE FIRST ISSUE of The Fugitive appeared in
Nashville bookstores on April 12, 1922. Less than a month before,
one of its founders Sidney Hirsch had suggested that the young
men gathered around him publish their poems in a magazine;
despite this apparent haste, however, the contents of the initial
number were revised and finished pieces. Drawn from an accumu-
lation of poems written over the past two years, they had been from
time to time subjected to the affable criticism of a group of estab-
lished friends: John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate,
Walter Clyde Curry, Stanley Johnson, Alec Stevenson, James
Frank, Sidney Hirsch, William Yandell Elliott, and William
Frierson. 1 For two years these men had held regular meetings at
1 These last two had left Nashville in the fall of 1920 on Rhodes Scholar-
ships and were never to take an active part in the production of The Fugitive,
though they had participated in the group discussions and were listed in The
Fugitive masthead as members in absentia.
4 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
which the topics of debate were exclusively literary; but long before
that time the group had its origin in intermittent philosophic dis-
cussions at Hirsch's apartment. In a letter written during the
summer of 1915 to Alec Stevenson, away on vacation in Canada,
William Elliott gave vivid evidence of the "Olympian" conver-
sation flourishing just off the Vanderbilt University campus that
summer:
Right now I am having what the debutantes twitter " a gorgeous
time." Nat Hirsch, Stanley Johnson, Donald Davidson, John Ransom,
and Sidney Hirsch were the company last night and it was Olympian.
I am living in rare altitudes this summer, though I haven't gone to
Monteagle yet. We get together often and I can feel myself grow.
Sidney Hirsch is a wonder, Nat is a World Man. Sidney has the
more imposing personality, and a head full of astounding mysticism.
But he isn't as genuine as Nat, the One and Only. And good, old
Johnny Ransom, the Rational, with Stanley Johnson, the Downright,
and Donald Davidson, musical as his name, with yours, the Egotist,
make up an odd group, but one that will be heard from.
Out on the Hirsches* porch, with the cigar ends glowing occasion-
ally, a debate always insured from the nature of the company, it is
The Happiness. Last night it was the Unity of Being that was under
discussion, Johnny maintaining a dualism at least flan Vital and
Material Expression, I, admitting a logical duality, maintaining a
pluralistic Individuality of Being, but a Metaphysical unity. I learned
a great deal. 2
These eager lines mark a point significant to the history of The
Fugitive, for in them is described a meeting of men who possess
that rare binding quality necessary to the formation of a group;
in them as well is evidence that the men who became the Fugitive
poets were interested, first of all, in philosophic inquiry. Here,
accordingly, seven years before the beginning of the magazine,
discussing formidably profound metaphysical problems with youth-
ful certainty, are the persons who formed the nucleus of the
Fugitives.
' Unpublished MS, July 23, 1915.
The Discursive Stage: 1903-19/6 5
The Hirsch apartment was on Twentieth Avenue, only a block
from the Vanderbilt campus, and the men gathered on the long
second-storey balcony, except for Hirsch himself, were Vanderbilt
teachers and students. As University men, they were regarded
with fond admiration by a town that considered itself " the Athens
of the South/' though a Southern respect for privacy insured their
being let alone and virtually unobserved. In their own minds these
young men stood for the sound rationalism that has always been
associated with the classical discipline. Never questioning the man-
liness and dignity of their unhampered conversation, they identified
themselves effortlessly with the freedom of academic life. If the
university was to prove indifferent to their joint creativity, it none-
theless provided the world in which, as poets, they could function.
They took their places in this world slowly, almost accidentally
it seems, over a period of twelve years. The assemblage began in
1903 with John Crowe Ransom, who came to Vanderbilt an in-
genuous freshman, looking even younger than his fifteen years. It
was no ordinary university to which he came. In its peculiar
mixture of the erudite and the homely, the universal and the local,
Vanderbilt was to furnish to the Fugitives that contrast of con-
ditions needed for the operation of intellectual creativity. That the
four chief Fugitives later developed a pronounced Southern com-
mitment was not due to an environment dominated by a narrow
filiopietism such as they might have encountered in other Southern
colleges. Nor did their later cast of mind spring from a reaction
against an engulfing progressivism. Sometimes in cultural crises
there are particular arenas where opposing ideas and beliefs can
come together in close contact, as on a stage, the ensuing dramatic
conflict revealing their true nature. Vanderbilt University during
the first three decades of the twentieth century was such a focal
point. Perhaps no other school, north or south, could have so
provided the Fugitives with the opportunities for understanding,
for rejection, and for affirmation.
When Ransom came to its classes, a mere thirty years after its
founding, the intellectual resources of the university were not
meager: the curriculum was restricted, it is true, but the subjects
6 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
studied were the staple ones that have made up the civilized man's
study throughout western civilization. Indeed, Vanderbilt was a
stronghold of classical culture, unmatched south of the Mason-
Dixon Line. At the time of its founding, in 1873, during the
bitterest portion of the Reconstruction, the other universities of the
section had been disabled, their efforts at restoration checked by
dependence upon state funds. With its relatively high salaries,
Vanderbilt drew from the best faculties throughout the South,
counting among its members the ex-chancellors of two state uni-
versities and numerous prized scholars. These were men imbued
with the concept of education as a process giving substance to
Christian ideals and so destroying the barriers between North and
South, America and the world, the present and the future. " The
University arrays itself against all sectionalism," one of its leaders,
Professor Andrew Lipscomb, ex-chancellor of the University of
Georgia, had declared at the inaugural ceremonies. 8 Continuing
this policy, Chancellor J. H. Kirkland, twenty years later succeed-
ing the first chancellor, indicated his conception of the aims of
the university: "We are working for ... the good of the whole
country," he announced. "No spirit of narrowness or prejudice
controls us here." 4
In the spirit of nonsectionalism Vanderbilt had been conceived,
and to that broad view it remained committed, though it partici-
pated little in the egalitarian desire of the New South leaders to
make the section like the rest of the nation. Its internationalism
was aristocratic, based on a respect for the best that had been known
and thought in the world. The men who guided it were un-
swervingly dedicated to a nineteenth-century liberalism calculated
to produce cosmopolitan American citizens cultivated, humane,
and successful. The dichotomy that characterized the Victorian
mind made up, on the one hand, of an intellectual attachment to
progress and, on the other, of a sentimental attachment to old
Quoted in Edwin Mims, History of Vanderbilt University (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 1946), 64.
4 Proceedings and Addresses at the Installation and Inauguration of James
Hampton Kirkland, Ph.D. (Nashville: Published by the University, 1893), 46.
The Discursive Stage: 1903-1916 7
virtues and old times was nowhere more apparent than in the
guiding minds behind this liberal Southern school. But the sur-
rounding land nurtured a conservative society whose easy manners
and customs endowed the school with a gentler aspect, providing
its students with a homogeneous outlook and a hardy traditionalism.
Thus, the bases upon which the university stood were comparative
prosperity, sound intellectual achievement, and a sturdy popular
approval, all undergirded by a liberal Protestantism. So supported,
Chancellor Kirkland viewed his faculty with confidence and
tolerance. "We demand first of all that our professors shall be
Christian men and competent scholars," he proclaimed, " but fur-
ther than that we have no questions to ask and no instructions
to give." 5
And it was with scholars and Christian gentlemen that the
teaching staff was filled and, further, with men who were drawn
from various locations outside the South. When Ransom entered
the university, Chancellor Kirkland himself, with his Ph.D. from
Leipzig, was Professor of Latin. Herbert Gushing Tolman, who
had received the doctorate from Yale, was Professor of Greek. One
of the nation's ablest scholars in Greek and Sanskrit, Tolman
instilled in his students an understanding of the nobility and
grandeur of Greek literature and was thus to have a profound
effect on the young men who became the Fugitives. Richard Jones,
Professor of English, had received his doctorate at Heidelberg; and
J. H. Stevenson, an expert in Hebrew and Old Testament Exege-
sis, had taken his degree from Chicago. Nine other doctors of
philosophy were on the faculty of the Academic Department, their
cosmopolitanism manifesting that freedom from localism which the
university's founders had proclaimed as an ideal.
But even so outstanding a faculty could hardly have maintained
the university's standards without adequately prepared students.
Fortunately, these were supplied by preparatory schools, their
character determined and their custom established some time before
Tennessee's public school system was at all satisfactory. The first
. t 4 6.
8 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
of these, the famous Webb School, had been established in Cul-
leoka, Tennessee, by a returning veteran, William R. ("Old
Sawney") Webb, a man of firm will and strict moral principle,
who was later joined by his brother, John ("Old Jack"). The
aim of these two was high; as Donald Davidson has written,
"They toadied to no educational fashion. Their staple diet was
Greek, Latin, and mathematics, with some concessions to history
and English. Out of the Spartan necessity enforced by the hard
times they made a glory and a moral." 6 Numerous university train-
ing schools, patterned after the Webb model, sprang up throughout
middle Tennessee as well as Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, and
Mississippi. These academies sent their most promising students
to Vanderbilt and were rewarded by receiving from the university
some of its best graduates as instructors. That a co-operation on
matters of curriculum and standards should grow up between the
university and its satellites was inevitable, the exchange making
for a brilliant and self-sustaining educational constellation.
It was to one of these preparatory institutions the Bowen
School in Nashville that John Ransom had been sent at eleven
years of age. 7 The training he received there was of germinal
importance to his later development and consequently to the whole
*The Tennessee (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1948), II, 143.
7 Ransom had come of a learned family: his father, Dr. John James Ransom,
a native of Rutherford County, Tennessee, was a missionary in the Methodist
church, a man with an established reputation in the South as linguist and
theologian. In his early life he had spent nine years in Brazil, making there
the first official connection for the Methodist church, had come back to Ten-
nessee and married Miss Ella Crowe, who had been teaching at the Martin
School in her native town of Pulaski, Tennessee, and after a final two-year
stay in South America, had come back to Pulaski long enough for John Crowe
Ransom to be born, April 30, 1888, the third of four children. After two years
in Cuba, the family returned to Tennessee, where young John received his early
education chiefly from his parents, since the Ransoms continued to move about
from place to place, in the custom of Methodist ministers 1 families.
Even in his childhood, John Ransom was amiable and talkative, yet reticent
about his private feelings, fitting well into a family whose attitude was a curious
mixture of reserve and gregariousness. He and his father often argued about an
idea until Mrs. Ransom had to caution them that the neighbors would think they
|. 6 /
were quarreling.
The Discursive Stage: 1903-1916 9
group of Fugitives, since to a degree he led the way for them all.
Of Headmaster A. G. Bowen, who taught Latin and Greek,
Ransom wrote later, "Certainly he did more for my education
than any other man. . . ." 8 Professor Bowen sometimes allowed
the boy to accompany him on Saturdays to Goodpasture's Book-
store, where he and other learned gentlemen discussed the classics.
Thus Ransom grew accustomed early to an atmosphere of lively
conversation passionate yet objective that can exist only in sur-
roundings providing both leisure and the conviction that talk is
not a waste of time.
At fifteen, well prepared, Ransom took Vanderbilt's rigorous
entrance examinations in English, history, mathematics, Latin, and
Greek, his papers in each of the first three subjects earning a first
prize. His initial year's work consisted of courses in Latin, Greek,
German, mathematics, and English, this latter course ending with
a consideration of Southern literature, as had been the custom at
Vanderbilt since the founding of the university. Professor Jones's
predecessor, William Malone Baskervill, who had come to Vander-
bilt from Wofford College, had in 1897 published a volume of
biographical and critical studies of various "new" Southern authors,
the local colorists and espousers of industrialization and techno-
logical progress Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, Maurice
Thompson, Sidney Lanier, George W. Cable, and Charles Egbert
Craddock. 9 As a result of Baskervill's faith in contemporary
Southern letters, the university's program of cosmopolitanism was
not allowed to obscure entirely the fact that " literature " need not
be limited to remote ages and places. Indeed, the school literary
magazine, The Observer, in 1903 labelled its age one which "in
some respects may be called the renaissance of American literature,
particularly in the South." 10 But the renaissance was to hold off
8 The Nashville Banner, November 10, 1948.
9 Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical Studies (Nashville: Publish-
ing House, M. E. Church, South, 1897). After Baskervill's death, some of his
former pupils brought out a second volume (1903).
""Literature and the Student," The Observer, XXVI, No. i (October,
1903), 3-
io The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
for a score of years awaiting the maturity of the boy who was
that year a freshman.
Upon completion of his sophomore year in 1905, Ransom left
Vanderbilt for a brief period of preparatory school teaching in
Mississippi. Two years later, however, he returned to the university
where he soon began taking an important part in campus literary
activities. President of the Dialectic Society, he was one of the
school's prize debaters. His ability in writing found outlet in the
campus newspaper, in The Observer (of which he was editor in
his senior year), and in the Calumet Club, a literary group made
up of students and faculty members. The Calumet Club met in-
formally in a suite at Kissam Hall, the men's dormitory, to discuss
literature and, specifically, to study modern authors. Something
of the long tradition of conversation out of which The Fugitive
was to emerge is revealed in the spirit of this club, which was to
exert strong influence at Vanderbilt during the twenties and to
continue on up to the present day. Many of the Fugitive poets
later credited the Calumet Club with introducing them to con-
temporary literature. But there was no real literary tradition at
Vanderbilt before Ransom; the only writers the school had pro-
duced were David Morton, the poet, and Grantland Rice, the
sports writer. Inasmuch as the reigning ideal of scholarship found
its embodiment in men with a broad knowledge of several disci-
plines, at Vanderbilt the purely literary man did not exist. Always
literature was related to life and except for the token paid to
regionalism to the classical past; and though the later Fugitives
were to rebel against this gentlemanly dilettantism as an approach
to literature, they were nonetheless in many ways shaped by it.
When the second member of the Fugitive group, Donald David-
son, 11 entered Vanderbilt in 1909, Ransom had already received
11 Of pioneer Tennessee stock (Davidson's great-great-grandfather, Andrew
Davidson, was an early settler of Bedford County, one of the latest counties in
Tennessee to be formed), most of Davidson's forebears had been farmers. But
his father, William Bluford Davidson, was a schoolteacher. He had been born
in Blue Stocking Hollow, near Richmond, Tennessee, not long after the Battle
of Shiloh, and he learned his Latin and Greek at one of the little schools the
The Discursive Stage: 1903-1916 n
his B. A. degree and had left to teach for a year at Lewisburg before
going on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. As Ransom was to be
the intellectual leader of the Fugitive group, so Davidson was to
provide its cohesive force. His warmth and loyalty were to pass
continuously amidst and about the group, binding it into an entity
which, though several in mind, was singular in affection. Like
Ransom, Davidson had spent his boyhood acquiring a classical
foundation that would underlie all his later learning; indeed, the
education he received at the Branham and Hughes Preparatory
School (where he studied four years of Latin and three of Greek)
was so rigorous that on first entering Vanderbilt he found his study
easy by comparison. He was a bright, gentle student with dark, dis-
concerting eyes, not as much interested in the literature of his own
language as in Latin and music.
His interest in literature quickened, however, during his fresh-
man year. Besides all of Kipling, he read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy,
some of the other Russians, and Maupassant; in fact, as he said
later, he started in to read the library straight through. The Mau-
passant he borrowed from the well-stocked shelves of books owned
by Ben and Varnell Tate, junior students from Ashland, Ken-
tucky, whose younger brother, Allen, would enter the university
returning veterans founded. When he decided to be a teacher, he attended
colleges at Troy, Alabama, and Winchester, Tennessee, and earned his degree
from Holbrook Normal in Lebanon, Ohio. His wife (Elma Wells, of Chapel
Hill, Tennessee) was a music and elocution teacher, who played the guitar and
the piano, passing on her love of music to her children.
Donald Grady Davidson was born August 18, 1893, in Campbellsville, but
spent most of his boyhood in nearby Lynnville, a little town about sixty-five miles
south of Nashville, in the bluegrass hills of middle Tennessee. He was the
oldest of five children, of whom two others have well-developed literary ability.
His family, like Ransom's, moved from town to town through the pleasant
rural section of middle Tennessee, as his father changed schools.
There was a good library in the Davidson home; the boy pored over
Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare's works, Ramsey's Annals of Tennessee, and the
ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. By the time he enrolled in Branham
and Hughes in 1905, he had already grown familiar with the world existing
behind the printed page. His uncle, Wallace Wells, had gone to Vanderbilt after
finishing at Branham and Hughes. Davidson, following in his uncle's footsteps,
entered Vanderbilt in 1909.
12 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
nine years later. But Davidson's leisurely reading was interrupted:
his father, a schoolteacher, found himself unable to continue his
son in college. Davidson had entered Vanderbilt, as he later put it,
"on a $100 loan and a little odd cash." 12 He was able to get a
further loan to finish out the year, but the next four years he
spent teaching in small towns, determined to save enough to
complete his work at Vanderbilt.
While Davidson was away from Nashville, four students later
to become part of the pre-Fugitive group entered the university:
Stanley Phillips Johnson in 1911, Alec Brock Stevenson in 1912,
and William Yandell Elliott and Nathaniel Hirsch in 1913. John-
son, who had attended Hume Fogg, a public high school in
downtown Nashville, was not equipped with a classical background
to match that of Ransom and Davidson, though he had studied
three and a half years of Latin. 13 Without the prerequisite of
Greek for the B. A., Johnson enrolled for work leading to the B. S.
degree and concentrated on philosophy and modern languages,
rather than on the classics. He was a forthright, pragmatical boy
who could always give his teachers a good argument. More than
any of the other Fugitives, he was in rebellion against his up-
bringing, mistrusting the ideas with which he had grown up, con-
vinced that he had to prove everything for himself.
Alec Stevenson was of a very different sort from Johnson; the
son of Professor J. H. Stevenson, who taught Semitic Languages
at Vanderbilt, he had perhaps the best precollege education of any
of the group. With parents who were both literary, he had grown
up, as he himself expressed it, " in a welter of words and books."
After four years' preparatory work in the Duncan School, adjoining
the Vanderbilt campus, Stevenson was well equipped to become, in
1914 and 1915, the literary leader among the university under-
graduates. 14 Elliott, entering from Webb School, had to his credit
19 Southern Writers in the Modern World (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1958), 9.
18 Johnson was a Nashville boy, born November 5, 1892, the son of W. D.
Johnson and Jessie Bryson Johnson.
14 Born in Toronto, December 29, 1895, the young Stevenson came to Nash-
The Discursive Stage: 1903-1916 13
four years of Latin and two and a half of Greek. 15 He was from
the beginning a leader, a hearty, huge-framed boy who was both
studious and active. The other new student, " Nat " Hirsch, al-
though he was never to be a member of the Fugitives, nevertheless
played a role in the formation of the group. Like Stanley Johnson,
he had attended Hume Fogg. He was to stay at Vanderbilt only
two years, but it was through him that the other boys' friendship
with his older brother Sidney was initiated.
Ransom returned to Vanderbilt as an instructor in 1914, having
taught Latin at a preparatory school in Litchfield, Connecticut,
for a year after he had received his B. A. in the Literary Humani-
ties from Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1913. At Oxford,
where he was a Rhodes Scholar for three years, he had belonged
to a literary group known as the Midwives, founded by his friend
Christopher Morley. Ransom's literary activities as an under-
graduate at Vanderbilt had developed his keen-cutting prose style,
and the associations at Oxford further committed him to the litera-
ture of his own tongue.
In his year of teaching Latin in New England, the conviction
had grown upon him increasingly that his real loyalty lay with
English literature because in it was embodied, he thought, a greater
ville with his parents within a few weeks after his birth, to grow up on the
Vandcrbilt campus. His early education was conducted by his mother and
father. His mother (nee Evelyn Sutherland) came from a long line of teachers
and writers in Canada; her father, Alexander Sutherland, was a Methodist
minister who as a boy had been a printer's devil. Young Stevenson spent his
summers in Canada at his grandfather's, and the doughty old Scotsman had a
great influence on him. His paternal grandfather had come to Ontario from the
north of Ireland, and it was in Ontario that Alec's father had started out as a
circuit rider in the Methodist church. A friend of Chancellor Kirkland, he had
been invited to Vanderbilt in 1893 to fill a temporary appointment, but it soon
became apparent that his connection with Vanderbilt was permanent. An only
child, young Stevenson spent his time until he was ten in the company of adults.
Other professors at the university were frequent visitors in the Stevenson home,
particularly Dr. Tolman, who had no children of his own, and who spent hours
with the bright little boy who could read Uncle Remus in dialect at the age
of five.
"Elliott was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, May 12, 1896. His parents
were S. William Yandell Elliott and Annie Mary (Bullock) Elliott.
14 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
concreteness than the classical languages possessed. His preference
at the time for Shakespeare and Browning tied in with his convic-
tion that the poet should deal with experience dramatically rather
than discursively. Even at twenty-five Ransom was developing
what he later called his " fury against abstraction," ie his concern
with the actuality of the human situation rather than with theo-
retical constructs revealing what was later to be more explicit, an
" existentialist " cast to his thinking. The three years abroad, with
holidays on the continent, had given him also a new appreciation
of the South, which he now saw less as a unique and peculiar
society than as a continuation of the major European tradition.
Consequently when he was invited to join the Vanderbilt faculty
by Dr. Edwin Mims, the new head of the English department,
Ransom was delighted both to return to the South and to teach
his native language.
He took a room in Kissam Hall, joining a company of eight
other bachelor instructors, whose rooms were a haven for students.
Indeed, most of the faculty members lived on the campus, so that
their relations with the students extended well beyond the class-
room. The josding encounters of daily life singled out those pro-
fessors who were penetrated by a consistent philosophy, and around
them students gathered, turning Vanderbilt's out-of -class hours into
something of a peripatetic school. As Robert Penn Warren was
later to acknowledge, Vanderbilt's surprisingly large production of
creative men might be attributable to the presence on campus of a
few professors of great stature a few, but not too many of whom
the student could become for a time a disciple. 17 Had there been
more such original thinkers, as there were in the Eastern uni-
versities, students likely would have turned from one to another,
skimming from each the impressive surfaces but never uncovering
16 This phrase and some of the immediately preceding information about
Ransom's days at Oxford are taken from an unpublished dissertation by John
Lincoln Stewart CThe Fugitive-Agrarian Writers: A History and a Criticism,
Ohio State University, 1947), 42-45.
17 May 4, 1956, at a session of the Fugitive Reunion, sponsored by the
American Studies Association and the Rockefeller Foundation, at Vanderbilt
University.
The Discursive Stage: 1903-1916 15
the deep insights which the intensive delving into one man's under-
standing could yield. As it was, the serious student tended to
borrow for a time one persuasive teacher's world view until he
knew how it operated, how it ordered existence; and in the process
of probing another's mind, he discovered the wellsprings of his
own originality.
The teaching of Herbert Charles Sanborn was an excellent ex-
ample of this training by apprenticeship. He alone made up the
philosophy department; and in study under him the student had to
come to terms with a completely developed Weltanschauung. San-
born had come to Vanderbilt in 1911 as head of the department,
replacing Collins Denny, with whom Ransom had studied. 18 A
pupil of Borden P. Bowne at Boston University, Sanborn had
received his doctorate at Munich, after other study at Heidelberg,
Berlin, Halle, and Leipzig. He was a brilliant scholar and linguist,
whose finest work was in aesthetic theory. Of his teaching, David-
son has written: "One could but be awed and obedient when
Dr. Sanborn strode vigorously to his desk, cloaked in all the
Olympian majesty of Leipzig and Heidelberg, and, without a book
or note before him, delivered a perfectly ordered lecture, freely
sprinkled with quotations from the original Sanskrit, Greek, Latin,
German, French, or Italian, which of course he would not insult
us by translating/' 19 It would be difficult to assign limits to San-
born's influence upon the various Fugitives. A defender of the
universals, a vigorous foe of scientific materialism, he gained his
students' respect whether or not they agreed with him.
In 1914, the same year Ransom came back in his capacity as
instructor, Donald Davidson likewise returned to the university.
18 At the Fugitive Reunion (May 1-5, 1956) Ransom described amusingly
his experience at Oxford with his tutor in philosophy. Collins Denny, Ransom's
teacher, was a pupil of Noah K. Davis and used his former professor's hooks as a
text in every subject he taught. When the Oxford tutor asked what Ransom had
read in metaphysics, the answer came: "Noah K. Davis," an authority with
whom the tutor was unacquainted. When the answer remained the same for each
branch of philosophy about which Ransom was questioned, both Ransom and
the tutor began to realize something of the task ahead of them.
19 Southern Writers in ike Modern World, 11-12.
1 6 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
He entered as a sophomore carrying a double load of classwork and
holding a teaching position at Wallace University School, a local
preparatory institution. He enrolled for Ransom's Shakespeare
class; and soon, with only five years separating them in age despite
the wide gap at this point in their educations the two young men
became good friends. At first Davidson was surprised and puzzled
at the Oxford man's flat voice, and, although he soon changed his
mind, considered him in the beginning a rather dull teacher. Al-
most pedantically, it seemed, Ransom analyzed the plays in class.
Along with the Shakespeare course, Davidson had a survey course
under Mims, who made him feel as though he had been " hit by a
cyclone," he later said. He had never realized that English litera-
ture had a history, and Mims's broad acquaintance with the dif-
ferent periods was to the younger man tremendously exciting.
Edwin Mims had returned to Vanderbilt as head of the English
department two years before. A graduate of Vanderbilt, he had
received his doctorate from Cornell, afterward teaching at Trinity
and the University of North Carolina. His volume on Sidney
Lanier 20 and an edition of Southern writers which he and a
former pupil had published 21 placed him as an authority on
Southern literature. Consequently it was with real enthusiasm that
he continued at Vanderbilt the emphasis upon regionalism. Mims
was always to be interested in sponsoring those elements in South-
ern writing which gave it local color and flavor and so, as he con-
sidered it, enriched American literature without tending toward
a bigoted sectionalism. Despite his own work in American letters,
however, it was his "Victorian Lit" course, along with excerpts
from the Victorians in the survey course, that had most effect upon
students. Tennyson's poems had marked a kind of conversion in
his life; consequently Mims tried to share with his pupils what
seemed to him "a new heaven and a new earth." 22 He was a
80 Sidney Lanier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1905).
21 Edwin Mims and Bruce Payne, Southern Literature for Schools (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910).
22 Quoted in the Durham, N. G, Morning Herald, March 4, 1956, Sec. IV.
The Discursive Stage: 1903-1916 17
popular lecturer, and most students responded, as did Davidson,
to the impact of his personality and enthusiasm.
About this same time, Davidson was meeting another literary
man of huge persuasiveness and charm Sidney Mttron 23 (pro-
nounced Me-tdt-tron) Hirsch, who had achieved " something of a
reputation as poet, journalist, orientalist, and linguist/' according
to an article in the 1913 Current Opinion. 2 * Sidney Hirsch was
the eccentric older half-brother of Nat Hirsch, who had made
friends particularly with Bill Elliott, Alec Stevenson, and Stanley
Johnson. When Nat invited these boys to his home, Sidney was
delighted at the opportunity to converse with percipient young
men. By his very makeup an eclectic, he had so prodigious a
memory that he could recite a page of printed material almost
perfectly after a single glance. Along with this amazing faculty
went a flair for the occult and a magnetic, dominating personality,
so that he always stood in need of an audience. 25 He had been
sent to the Webb School, but his independent temperament made
him incapable of submitting to Old Sawney's discipline. His higher
education had been similar, punctuated by trips from college to
college, his family finally acknowledging that so pronounced a
genius must not be intended to have a formal education. He ran
off to the navy for three years and afterwards travelled through
the Far East, his receptive mind soaking up Oriental art and
mysticism. When he returned, his family secured for him a tutor
a sculptor named Chase who was acquainted with and had taught
numerous figures prominent in art circles. Hirsch travelled abroad
with Chase, enjoying the privilege of moving in a world of celebri-
ties. He stayed for a while in New York as part of the company of
such fashionable writers and artists as Percy Mackaye, Edith
"The name of the great Angel-Prince (in the Kabbalah) who constitutes
the visible manifestation of the deity.
" " A Greek Pageant in Tennessee," Current Opinion, LV, No. 3 (Septem-
ber, 1913)* i74.
25 Hirsch had been born in Nashville, sometime in the 1 88o's, into a
cultured Jewish family. His father, by a first marriage, had two children Rose
and Sidney. After the death of his wife Mr. Hirsch had married again, two
more children Nathaniel and Goldie issuing from this second marriage.
1 8 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Thomas, Lorado Taft, and Jock Whitney. In New York he had a
hand in several short dramatic skits and, after coming back to
Nashville, in 1913 wrote and produced what Collier's Weekly
called " the most artistic and ambitious spectacle ever given in the
South," 2e a Greek pageant entitled The Fire Regained. Hirsch had
become convinced that an esoteric symbolism lay behind all great
works of literature and explained the Greek dramatic poet's method
(which he attempted to employ in his pageant) as a symbolical one.
The whole community had taken part in the production, much in
the spirit of a Panhellenic festival. Some of the features of the
performance were " a chorus of five hundred, a flock of five hundred
doves, a drove of three hundred sheep and a chariot race." 2T
Sidney's brother Nat was one source through whom Johnson,
Stevenson, Elliott, and Davidson had access to this brilliant and
eccentric man. His sister Goldie Hirsch was another connection.
Davidson was taking work during the summer of 1915 at Pea-
body Summer School, across the street from Vanderbilt, where
Miss Hirsch was also enrolled. With Stanley Johnson, Davidson
made up a foursome with Goldie and Will Ella Tatum, who was
later to become Johnson's wife. Davidson was drawn into the magic
circle of the Hirsch household, which had become a frequent meet-
ing place for the young intelligentsia. Hirsch was in and out of
Nashville, his sophistication impressing his protegees as no aca-
demic training could have done. His expansive, enveloping warmth
and his flattering attention to their ideas buoyed the spirits of his
young audience, who, having no personal acquaintance with the
glamorous world of which he spoke, were pleased at seeming con-
siderable to a man of such parts.
Conversation grew so exciting and momentous that Davidson
invited Ransom to join the group. Ransom brought with him the
literary sophistication of Oxford and a more rigorous turn to the
group discussion. Where Hirsch had encouraged in the young men
an enthusiastic but somewhat undisciplined largeness of thought,
* 6 Quoted in " A Greek Pageant in Tennessee," toe. cit., 174.
" T Ibid., 174-75-
The Discursive Stage: 1903-1916 19
Ransom made his influence felt by the example he set in fine
discrimination between ideas. In argument, Ransom was a formid-
able opponent; and in conversation he was tentative, dry, and
incisive. The cool logic which he thrust into the group's talks was
a spur in particular to Stanley Johnson, who had become imbued
with Borden P. Bowne's philosophy of Personalism. And though
Johnson's main allegiance was always to be with action, still he
enjoyed wrestling with knotty problems and could stand up to
Ransom in argument. Davidson remembers " how stubbornly and
constantly " Johnson argued with Ransom and Elliott and " how
sternly he refused to give ground." 28 This was the period of the
letter from Bill Elliott to Alec Stevenson, describing the evening of
" Olympian " conversation. These were, indeed, the halcyon days.
Sometimes there were gay occasions when Davidson played the
piano and sang, the others joining in on choruses. But most of the
time there was nothing more than good conversation. Hirsch's
expounding of occult mysteries was not allowed to get very far
out of hand; either Ransom's empiricism or Johnson's pragmatism
pulled him back into the realm of intelligibility. But frequently
there was a probing into metaphysical obscurities in which distinc-
tions became very fine indeed. By the time Stevenson returned
from Canada in the fall, he found the group well established; and
he quite happily joined it.
That same fall a young doctor of philosophy from Leland Stan-
ford came to the Vanderbilt faculty; Walter Clyde Curry, like most
of his colleagues, had a rural Southern background that his polished
suavity was likely to belie. 29 He was a scholar dedicated more to
a philosophical and historical approach to literature than to a
* 8 Southern Writers in the Modem World, 12.
99 Curry was born near Gray Court, South Carolina, January 6, 1887, and
often took pleasure in reminding his classes that he had known the feel of clods
breaking under bare feet as he plowed. His undergraduate days were spent at
Wofford College in nearby Spartanburg, but he went west for his graduate work,
where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Middle English ideal of personal
beauty (The Middle English Ideal of Personal Beauty; as found in the Metrical
Romances, Chronicles, and Legends of the XIII, XIV, and XV Centuries, Bal-
timore: J. H. Furst and Company, 1916).
20 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
creative one, even though he was to write some good poetry and,
under the stimulus of the Fugitive group, become seriously in-
terested in aesthetic questions. It was not long before Davidson
invited him to the meetings on Twentieth Avenue, where his
philological training was welcomed, particularly by Hirsch, whose
interest in languages exceeded his mastery of them.
The group interest remained primarily philosophical, even
though Alec Stevenson, who had a facility in verse forms that his
associates lacked at this point, was writing some accomplished poetry
and prodding others to do so. As editor of The Observer in 1915,
Stevenson was adversely critical of the quality of literature pro-
duced at Vanderbilt, lamenting the lack of an advanced course
in writing. 30 At the same time, literary discussion in the Calumet
Club grew more intense, and arguments about the " new poetry "
began to spill over into the Hirsch group. Stanley Johnson became
convinced that he and his friends should be writing in the new
idiom. One day he took Davidson up to his room in Wesley Hall
and solemnly showed him a new book Spoon River Anthology.
" We should have done this," he said grimly. " He's beaten us
to it."
The young men at Vanderbilt were not writing the new poetry,
nonetheless. By June, 1916, the vers libre controversy had stimu-
lated an article on that subject in The Observer; 81 but, though
Johnson himself tried the new technique and a few other students
experimented with it, there was no concerted effort in that direction
until, a short while later, Ransom tried his hand at poetry. One
day in the fall of 1916 Ransom showed Davidson the first poem
he had ever written, " Sunset." His poem reflected a reading of
Frost and Robinson, though it is in the new free verse. It begins:
I know you are not cruel,
And you would not willingly hurt anything in the world.
* No. i (September, 1915), 36. One was added in 1917 for John Ransom
to teach, but since he left for the army in May of that year, the course was not
well established until he returned to the university in 1919.
81 Clopper Almon, "Vers Libre and the Spoon River Anthology," XXXVIII,
No. 4, pp. 40-47-
The Discursive Stage: 1903-1916 21
There is kindness in your eyes,
There could not very well be more of it in eyes
Already biimful of the sky.
I thought you would some day begin to love me,
But now 1 doubt it badly;
It is no man-rival I am afraid of,
It is God.
The meadows are very wide and green,
And the big field of wheat is solid gold,
Or a little darker than gold.
Two people never sat like us by a fence of cedar rails
On a still evening
And looked at such fat fields.
To me it is beautiful enough,
I am stirred,
1 say grand and wonderful, and grow adjectival,
But to you
It is God. 32
There are four more stanzas in the same style. In spite of the
ineptncss of its lines, something of Ransom's wry flavor comes
through in this first poem; and certainly it makes use of one of
Ransom's most frequently encountered and most successfully
handled later subjects: the physical world menaced by the terrible
simplicity of an idea, as in " Spectral Lovers " and " History of
Two Simple Lovers," later entitled " The Equilibrists."
At twenty-eight, Ransom had written much good prose, but had
not attempted verse before, whereas Davidson had written a kind
of poetry ever since he could remember. And now, when Davidson
liked " Sunset," as did Ransom's other friends to whom he showed
the poem, Ransom continued in the same vein with three more
pieces. He sent all four to The Independent, where they were
accepted; and, soon after, Christopher Morley reprinted some of
them in his column "The Chaffing Dish," in the Philadelphia
Evening Public Ledger.
" Sunset," Poems about God (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1919),
22 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Ransom had taken up poetry now in earnest. But Davidson
was as yet unawakened to its potential seriousness. He had con-
tributed verses to the school paper at Branham and Hughes; had
composed both words and music for an operetta at Cedar Hill
Institute, where he taught after his freshman year in college; and
had published occasional poems in the Vanderbilt Observer, all
without awareness of the inner nature of poetry. To him at the
time, poetry was principally song, with no great burden of thought.
Indeed, the close conjunction of poetry and music was always to
be apparent in his work. When his keen logic was to couple with
his urgent sense of history to give substance to his mature poems,
they were still to have a structuralizing aural quality.
Actually, though die group conversation had not yet turned
overtly to literature, the elements of their later poetry were gather-
ing in all the members of the group. Their native heritage provided
them with an earthy colloquial language full of metaphor and
concreteness, with traditional rhythms, with a tendency to view
life analogically and dramatically, and with a set of shared, though
unspoken, cultural convictions. Their university study made avail-
able a recondite vocabulary, classical metres, and a fund of abstract
ideas. The group experience in philosophy had made possible an
intellectual exchange; and, far from weakening individuality, the
intermingling of various personalities defined and strengthened
identity. Hirsch, Ransom, Curry, Davidson, Stevenson, Johnson,
and Elliott all young men, unmarried and committed to learning
these were fashioning unconsciously the implements of poetry in
their evening philosophical speculations, which were interrupted by
the great disjunctions of the first world war.
CHAPTER TWO
My\ll^
DISRUPTION, REASSEMBLY,
AND THE
TURN TO POETRY:
1917-1921
WITH THE BEGINNING of the European war,
discussions of world affairs, of politics, and of programs for action
cut into the leisurely and free talk on the Vanderbilt campus.
Sentiment at the university was not dominantly pro-Ally; a grave
distrust of nationalism predisposed many students and professors to
remain neutral in their sympathies. In 1915 Ransom wrote an
article which portrayed the conflict as involving not the powers of
right and wrong, but two equally tenable philosophies. " Each, as
I conceive it," he wrote, " stands on solid moral ground; and the
tragedy is that two good ideals should prove so irreconcilable. This
is not a new phenomenon. It happened in our own Civil War,
where the North was fighting with the loftiest missionary zeal to
emancipate an oppressed class, and the South was fighting for
political freedom." x The lesson learned by Southerners from the
1 "The Question of Justice," The Yale Review, IV (July, 1915), 684.
24 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Civil War that right is seldom univocal was only fifty years old
and hence in Nashville not entirely out of mind.
It was no Southern bias, however, that caused one faculty
member to adopt an open sympathy for Germany. Professor San-
born had received a great part of his education in that country-
had, in fact, taken his doctorate at Munich. As Mims has written
of him, " He absorbed the technique and the spirit of German
scholarship when it was in its most flourishing period. German phi-
losophers and psychologists were, to him, the heroes of thought/' 2
It was not inconsistent, therefore, that he should defend German
principles in the war. He was allowed to express his opinion freely,
in speeches, in articles, in the classroom until the declaration of
war by the United States, at which time Chancellor Kirkland
quietly called the forthright philosopher to his office and directed
him to be silent. Indeed, at that point, the whole university will-
ingly curtailed some of its freedom of thought and set about
reorganizing itself to help in the fight, assuming without question
that the atmosphere of gentlemanly liberality would be resumed
after the emergency.
Crowds of students and young faculty members applied for
admission to Officers' Training Camp. Ransom was among the few
chosen from Vanderbilt to go to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, May 12,
1917; and at the same time, Davidson, who had been teaching at
the Massey School in Pulaski, was included in the quota from
nearby Columbia. The two friends were delighted to encounter
each other at Oglethorpe, and, on Sundays, sat and talked under
the pine trees at the foot of Snodgrass Hill, with Ransom reading
the poems that afterwards made up Poems about God, his first
published volume.
The Hirsch circle had disintegrated. Hirsch himself and Curry
remained in Nashville, but the animating spirits were missing, with
Ransom and Davidson gone, as well as Johnson and Elliott, both of
whom had by now joined the armed forces. Alec Stevenson, who
on his graduation in 1916 had taken a position with the Phila-
delphia North American, came home after the declaration of war
8 Mims, History of Vanderbilt University, 247.
Disruption, Reassembly, and the Turn to Poetry 25
with the intention of entering the navy. When his Canadian
citizenship prevented his acceptance, he took up the study of
chemistry to qualify himself for work in a war industry and spent
the summer of 1917 on the Vanderbilt campus. As always, his
home provided a gathering place for friends; along with Davidson,
who came to Nashville frequently, Ransom and Elliott spent eve-
nings and weekends with him. But these visits could not recapture
the atmosphere of the meetings at Hirsch's apartment. The temper
of the times had changed, and the men themselves were in no
mood for disinterested rational inquiry. In September the army
proved less discriminating than the navy; Stevenson was drafted
and in May sent to France to attend the Officers' Training School
at Saumur.
Even overseas, the friends encountered each other from time to
time. Ransom had been commissioned a first lieutenant in the
Fifth Field Artillery at Fort Oglethorpe and sent to France, where,
after four months' service in the field, he was sent back to Saumur
as an instructor. When Stevenson arrived there, William Frierson
(a Vanderbilt student who was later to become a member of the
Fugitive group) was one of ten other Vanderbilt men taking the
Officers' Training course concurrently. As Stevenson later com-
mented, " Fate seemed always to throw some of the Fugitives to-
gether, wherever we were." Davidson reached France a short while
later, as a second lieutenant in the infantry. He and his company
were moved into a quiet sector of the front in France, and, on
November 2, were ordered to advance to an active frontal section.
After a few days' heavy fighting, they received news of the Armi-
stice, but were not mustered out until the following June, when
the company returned to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, its place
of origin.
In the period after the Armistice, when an indulgent govern-
ment arranged for its heroes to sample the offerings of various
European universities, Elliott and Frierson took courses at the
Sorbonne, Ransom at Grenoble, and Stevenson at the University of
Clermont. In the spring of 1919, just before embarking for the
26 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
United States, Stevenson ran into Ransom again in Brest. They
were overjoyed at seeing each other and spent the afternoon in
a small tavern, talking and reading poetry much of it from Poems
about God, which had just been published.
Before Ransom left Vanderbilt for the army, some of his poems
had already appeared in The Independent, the Philadelphia Eve-
ning Public Ledger, and Contemporary Verse, a little magazine
published in Philadelphia. These poems gave him the idea for his
first volume: he was surprised, he wrote in the introduction, to
find that they centered around the word God: "I studied the
matter a little, and came to the conclusion that this was the most
poetic of all terms possible; was a term always being called into
requisition during the great moments of the soul, now in tones of
love, and now indignantly; and was the very last word that a man
might say in the presence of that ultimate mystery to which all
our great experiences reduce." 8 The rest of the poems for the
volume he composed consciously around this schematism, after
having ruled that he would make use of only those situations in
which he genuinely felt the name God could be pronounced " sin-
cerely and spontaneously, never by that way of routine which is
death to the aesthetic and religious emotions." 4 The poems were
all finished before he left the States, and, by the time he wrote his
introduction to the volume (May 13, 1918), he was able, as he
said, to " look back upon these antebellum accomplishments with
the eye of the impartial spectator, or at most with a fatherly tender-
ness, no more." 6 He sent the poems to Christopher Morley, who
showed them to Robert Frost. Frost read them and recommended
them to Henry Holt and Company for publication; early in April,
1919, the book issued from the press.
Poems about God was not extraordinarily well-received; yet for
a first volume, from an unknown, its notices were not inconse-
quential. 8 Its most important bit of recognition came from Louis
* Poems about God, vi-vii.
* Ibid., vii.
8 Ibid., v.
Charles W. Stork, " Recent Verse," The Yak Review, IX (April, 1920),
Disruption, Reassembly, and the Turn to Poetry 27
Untermeyer, writing in The Dial, though his review missed the
animating impulse behind the poetry he labelled as part of the
" return to brutality." None of Ransom's reviewers perceived the
essential quality of his verse, which was neither harsh and bitter,
as some thought, nor, as others felt, merely realistic. Though
ragged in form and many times uncertain, Poems about God re-
vealed Ransom's primarily metaphysical bent: the idea that teased
him into his experiment was the old Parmenidean paradox of the
One and the Many; and the conclusion intended by Ransom was of
the same sort as that reached in the Socratic " dialogues of search,"
where a specific idea is shown as incapable of being limited to a set
definition or to a series of individual instances. But Ransom's
allegiance, unlike Socrates', was to the fulness of individual ex-
perience rather than to the universal toward which the experience
tended. His dominant attitude was an anti-abstractionism mani-
festing itself as a preoccupation with the uniqueness of individual
experience, in which the dualism of man's condition becomes ap-
parent. To Ransom, at this stage as always, abstract ideas were the
fruit merely of man's desire for order in a disorderly universe. One
of the poems in the volume" The Swimmer "to take an example
in point, presents a view of man in a state of perilous imbalance-
desiring to swim forever in the cool water of rationality, away from
the heat of physical being:
I have no home in the cruel heat
On alien soil that blisters feet.
This water is my native seat,
And more than ever cool and sweet,
So long by forfeiture escheat.
And what if I do not rise again,
Never to goad a heated brain
To hotter excesses of joy and pain?
664; Maurice Egan, The Bookman, L (October, 1919), 222-23; Alice Corbin
Henderson, "An American Georgian," Poetry, XVI (April, 1920), 51; Louis
Untermeyer, "The Cult of Brutality," The Dial, LXVI (May 31, 1920), 562.
28 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Why should it be against the grain
To lie so cold and still and sane?
Water-bugs play shimmer-shimmer,
Naked body's just a glimmer,
Watch ticks every second grimmer:
Come to the top, O wicked swimmer! 7
This first volume convinced Ransom that he could write poetry
that could in some measure embody his insight into the nature of
existence. The problem of expressing his perceptions accurately
and fully in verse resolved into a matter of mastering technique;
accordingly he set himself diligently to work.
His return to Vanderbilt in the fall of 1919 came after some
deliberation on the problem of whether to resume teaching or turn
to journalism in New York. During the war he had time for read-
ing and reflection, and more and more he had found it impossible
to dismiss his own attempts at writing. 8 In a letter to Charles
Cason, Secretary of the Vanderbilt Alumnus, Ransom wrote, " The
fact is I love English literature; and if I am left alone I would love
to teach it in my own way, as well as always, whatever happens,
to do a certain amount of scribbling fatigue of my own." !) But, he
realized, if he did return to teaching, it would have to be to a
position of more responsibility than a mere instructorship. 10 Mims
settled the problem by offering him an assistant professorship, and
at thirty-one Ransom took up his teaching, especially the new
advanced composition course, with fresh interest.
The Hirsch group, scattered by the war, reassembled somewhat
slowly; but, in the end, not one man would be lost to it except
Nat Hirsch, who had left for Harvard before the war. The first
stage of its reassembly came in the fall of 1919, when Ransom and
Curry began coming to visit Hirsch. They found that he had
7 Poems about God, 4-5.
Letter, The Vanderbilt Alumnus, III, No. 3 (January, 1918), 77. The
letter is apparently addressed to a friend, dated December i, 1917, from " Some-
where in France."
Unpublished MS., March 5, 1918.
10 Ibid.
Disruption, Reassembly, and the Turn to Poetry 29
moved in with the James Franks, at 3802 Whitland Avenue, a
large two-storey red-brick house in a quiet wooded section of town,
a few miles west of Vanderbilt. Mr. Frank, the husband of Rose
Hirsch, Sidney's sister, was a businessman in his fifties with a back-
ground of culture and refinement. 11 In reality a very learned man,
he possessed a quiet modesty about his own talents, content to
lavish appreciation on those he considered more gifted than himself.
Thus his wife's brother Sidneythe genius, the seer became for
Frank the object of veneration. An injury that Hirsch had suffered
in the Orient confined him frequently to his chaise longue; as a
consequence, the four Frank servants, as well as Mr. and Mrs.
Frank themselves, were at his command. But later on, when the
Fugitives met at his house, they most respected and revered James
Frank, the sweet and gentle man who, not seriously dedicated to
poetry himself, fostered it in others.
Ransom took a room in Kissam Hall near Curry, who had re-
mained in Nashville during the war; and the two frequently shared
their knowledge in literature and philosophy. Ransom was dis-
satisfied with his work in Poems about God and had turned to
experimentation with the sonnet form. He and Curry traded son-
nets back and forth, and frequently the discussion of their poems
extended to an evening at the Franks'. Ransom found his friends
little changed. Hirsch's provoking intellect, turned now to an
examination of the symbolical aspects of etymology, and Curry's
genuine, though conservative, literary taste combined with Frank's
11 A native of Marshall County, Frank was born in 1867 of a brilliant
German-born Jewish father and a mother who came from a noted Southern
family, the Harrises. Her grandfather and father had founded Harrisburg and
received a government grant of three thousand acres. James Frank's father, who
had come to this country when he was about ten, was a fine violinist; when he
married, he took over the management of his wife's farm, but without much
success. A serious crop failure in Frank's thirteenth year caused the family to
give up farming and come to Nashville to live. As a boy Frank had gone to
Howard School; and, after graduating from Peabody College, had taught a few
years, finding teaching a profession for which he had great natural inclination.
Nevertheless, by the time he was thirty, he felt heavily the responsibility of
supporting his family and so went into the custom shirt business, at which he
was quite successful.
30 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
graciousness to provide a peculiarly suitable foil for Ransom's
thought. Sometimes present were William Elliott and William
Frierson, both back at Vanderbilt from the Sorbonne, Elliott to
teach on the English faculty and work for his M. A. degree, Frier-
son to complete his senior year as an English major. Though they
were younger than the others, their rather conventional taste in
literature in contrast with their iconoclasm in matters of philoso-
phy, economics, and social thought fitted in with the congregation
of older men with no jarring dissension. More hearty and domi-
nating than ever, Elliott was to take up his Rhodes Scholarship
the next fall, but during the summer he was present for group
meetings, as he was to be for almost every summer during the next
five years. Frierson, too, was to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship
for 1920-21, and, after receiving his B. A. from Vanderbilt in
June, would spend the summer in fellowship with the group.
The second stage of the group's reunion came in the summer
of 1920, when Stevenson and Davidson were again present for
meetings. Stevenson had returned to Nashville early in the year, on
the death of his father, Professor J. H. Stevenson. He had been
living in an apartment on Washington Square, Philadelphia, which
he shared with Christopher and Felix Morley. All three were
writing for newspapers: Christopher for the Evening Public
Ledger, Felix for the Morning Ledger, and Stevenson for the North
American. Back in Nashville, Stevenson went to work for the
Tennessean in February and, a few months later, changed over to
the Banner. But it took him only a short while to see that he was
not suited for the uncertain life of a newspaperman; hence in May
of that same year he accepted a position in Nashville with the
American National Securities Company, the investment affiliate of
the American National Bank. Stevenson was glad to take up
literature again with his old friends and made a pleasant and valu-
able member of the group, which was rapidly regaining its old
status.
Davidson was back in Nashville in anticipation of a teaching
appointment at Vanderbilt for the coming fall. He had been under
severe financial strain after the war. Shortly before leaving for
Disruption, Reassembly, and the Turn to Poetry 31
overseas, he had married Theresa Sherrer, an Ohio girl who had
been teaching Latin and mathematics in Martin College, Pulaski.
Their daughter was born while he was away; hence Davidson faced
serious responsibilities on his discharge from the army. When he
first came through Nashville hoping to find a position, his friends
had not returned: Ransom was still at Grenoble, Elliott at the
Sorbonne, and Stevenson in Philadelphia. Davidson went on to
Ohio to join his wife and baby and there tried unsuccessfully to
find a place with one of the newspapers or with the city schools.
Finally, however, a Nashville teachers' agency placed him at Ken-
tucky Wesleyan; but once he had arrived there, despite the
beauty of the surrounding country, Davidson was discontented.
Neither the faculty nor the students provided the stimulation he
had come to associate with a college. Consequently, when Mims
offered him the opportunity of teaching freshman English and
studying for his M. A. degree, he eagerly accepted. For the sum-
mer he took a temporary position as reporter on the Evening
Tennessean and so was present at the group meetings from June on.
With Davidson's re-entry, the prewar circle was back together
except for Stanley Johnson, who would return in 1921. The only
additions were James Frank and Bill Frierson, neither of whom
greatly affected the nature of the discussions. Yet the drift of
conversation that summer at the Franks' gradually changed, turning
ever more surely from philosophy toward literature, particularly
poetry. Not only Ransom and Curry, but Davidson, too, was eager
for practice in poetic craft; while he was in the army, using his
leisure hours to write verse, he had his wife send him books from
time to time, and one he asked for specifically was Amy Lowell's
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. 12 Back in Tennessee, he
had shown some of his work mainly in free verse to Stevenson,
who told him frankly that it had little worth. Surprised by this
19 Ironically enough, Ransom wrote home to his friend Charles Cason for
The Home Book of Verse. At the time he was turning out his unsentimental
" modern " Poems about God, he seems to have been still unconcerned about the
work of contemporary poets. As Allen Tate has said of him, " He was modern
without knowing it."
32 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
judgment, Davidson had begun to think more seriously about the
art of poetry, and added his emphasis to the critical and creative
turn the group endeavor was taking. With Ransom having pub-
lished a volume, and with all the other evening visitors engaged in
English studies and writing verses of their own, it is not surprising
that the character of the meetings should have shifted. But Hirsch
was not to be deflected entirely from his expansive discourses on
the ideal realm, of which the events in this world are mere symbols.
And when literature was the subject of conversation, he managed
to direct the examination of it into etymological channels. As
Davidson has described it, Hirsch would pick out a word
. . . most likely a proper name like Odysseus or Hamlet or Parsifal, or
some common word like fool or fugitive and then, turning from dic-
tionary to dictionary in various languages, . . . unroll a chain of veiled
meanings that could be understood only through the system of ety-
mologies to which he had the key. This, he assured us, was the wisdom
of the ages a palimpsest underlying all great poetry, all great art, all
religion, in all eras, in all lands. All true poets possessed this wisdom
intuitively, he told us solemnly, repeatedly. 13
Whatever the direction taken, it was heady conversation; thus for
the young men, the group meetings held a compelling sense of
importance, and the comfortable home and the food served by Mrs.
Frank added to the pleasure of the occasions.
Wiser now and more mature than when they left, but at ease
in their haven, these men did not realize that the world as they
had known it was disintegrating. Yet even in their own small
university cosmos the old order was giving way to something with
which they were totally unfamiliar. Utilitarianism was becoming
the controlling attitude at Vanderbilt as it had become dominant,
even earlier, in most other universities in the nation. When Ran-
som and Davidson were students, Vanderbilt had clear-cut educa-
tional aims, based on the imperturbable structure of all past knowl-
edge and transmitted to its students as an essentially aristocratic
attitude. The new philosophy of education shifted this basis, focus-
18 Southern Writers in the Modern World, 12.
Disruption, Reassembly, and the Turn to Poetry 33
ing on the recipients of knowledge rather than the disciplines them-
selves, with a consequent democratization of attitude, so that the
aims of education were made subject to timeliness and opportunism,
and standards began their long downward plunge. In the 1 900*5,
Ciceronian humanism was the ideal at Vanderbilt: the purpose of
education was not to teach vocational skills but to turn out men of
good background who could bring to their daily tasks a distinction
that derived from superiority of intellect and character. In 1908-
1909, the year Ransom graduated, all who were working toward a
B. A. degree were required to study a year of Latin, a year of Greek
(these requirements presupposed four years of Latin and three of
Greek in high school), and a year each of mathematics, English,
chemistry, history, and philosophy. A major in English literature
required two years of Latin, Greek, French, German, two and a
half of Biblical literature, and one of Anglo-Saxon.
But by 1919 neither of the classical languages was required,
although English majors were advised to include both Latin and
Greek. Referring to the new curriculum changes as a "long
step in the direction of wider service and more varied educational
opportunities/' 14 the May, 1919, Alumnus reported an epoch-
making event in complete oblivion of its real consequences. The
modifications could hardly represent a more striking reversal of
values: "They include an increase in the industrial courses in
Chemistry," the editors wrote, " making that subject more largely
vocational than formerly; the introduction of a Department of
Commercial Science or Business Administration .... the abolition
of Latin and Greek as requirements for the B. A. degree and
making all subjects elective with the exception of English, Mathe-
matics, and Chemistry in the first year."
So ended officially at Vanderbilt the assumption that an edu-
cated man must be familiar with the classics, a demise that, as
Donald Davidson later wrote, "required the combined battering
of the elective system, compulsory school laws, tremendous financial
expenditures, and high pressure salesmanship by teachers' col-
14 IV, No. 6, 170.
34 The Fugitive Group. A Literary History
leges." 15 Such a step was not sudden; it represented the culmina-
tion of several centuries' secularism. But there was no doubt about
its efficacy; imbued with the idea of immediate practicality, students
would no longer elect to take the two " dead " languages. The old
humanistic tradition, "the collective wisdom of the race, made
memorable in literature," 10 was discarded as worn out. Indeed, the
upsurge of enthusiasm and power at Vanderbilt from the middle
of the 1910*5 on had been directed toward progress and liberalism.
But the university was filled with a heavy proportion of students
who had received their preparatory education from the private
schools directed by headmasters not much changed from those of
the antebellum South, to whom Homer, Virgil, and Horace seemed
more legitimate ancestors than Rousseau, or Wordsworth, or Shel-
ley. Thus, like its prototype the English Renaissance, the Ten-
nessee Renaissance, as it has been called, sprang from the fierce
impact of modernism upon a settled society, one which in this
instance still maintained living customs and habits from the great
European synthesis formed in the Middle Ages.
Ransom, Davidson, and the others meeting in the group sessions
were unaware that their fealty lay with the traditional Southern
way of life. They would have scorned geographical limitations
set upon their thinking or upon their artistic sources. Surrounding
them in their native territory they could see only the ugliness, the
ignorance, and the inscnsitivity of many of the people with whom
they dealt, and they took refuge in their world of philosophy and
poetry. It would be some years later that they discerned the sources
of the harsh and jarring elements in their local scene, just as they
reached later an understanding of the proper relationship between
art and society. But at the time their topics of discussion were
medieval, Elizabethan, Italian Renaissance, Oriental, or nineteenth-
century French anything but Southern.
By the time Stanley Johnson returned to Vanderbilt in 1921
to teach and to work on his Master's degree, he found the group
" "The English Teacher and the Lost Humanities," The Harvard Graduates'
Magazine, XLII, No. CLXVII (March, 1934), 177.
"Ibid., 187-
Disruption, Reassembly, and the Turn to Poetry 35
meeting with some regularity. Johnson had taught in the Uni-
versity of Manila for two years following his release from the army,
and while he was in the Philippines had written a novel, Bamboo,
which Harrison Smith Publishing Company had accepted but
never printed because of financial failure. Soon after he came back
to Tennessee, he married Will Ella (or as she called herself by
then, Willa) Tatum, his companion in the carefree days before
the war. She was a sensible, intelligent young woman who aided
Johnson greatly in his literary career and who, as librarian at
Vanderbilt during the days of The Fugitive, was a source of help
to the entire group.
Ransom, too, had married. Robb Reavill, a Wellesley school-
mate of Elizabeth Kirkland, the Chancellor's daughter, had been
visiting in Nashville when she met Ransom, and in December,
1920, the two were married. With Elliott and Frierson away, all
the members of the group, except Curry and Hirsch, were now
family men of responsibility. Four of the men, moreover, were
faculty members, teachers of literature in a department which,
under Mims's guidance, exchanged ideas freely but decorously.
Every Saturday at noon the staff-members would meet on the
campus, walk to town, and eat lunch at a French restaurant named
Faugon's. There the group would discuss literature and philosophy
in the manner of gentlemanly members of a profession not a
greatly different manner from that prevailing in various organiza-
tions in town the Round Table, the Coffee House Club, and the
Old Oak Club. It was this air of the comfortable gentlemen's club
that might have dominated the meetings at the Frank home, had
not a new entry about this time disrupted their complacency.
In November, 1921, Davidson invited Allen Tate, a brilliant
student entering his senior year, to visit the next meeting of the
group, which by then had been gathering regularly every other
Saturday night " to read poems and discuss ' philosophy/ " 17 John
Orley Allen Tate was of the generation just young enough to miss
17 Tate, "The Fugitive 1922-1925: A Personal Recollection Twenty Years
After," foe. cit., 75.
36 The Fugith e Group: A Literary History
the war but old enough to sense the disillusionment in its wake. 18
He was native to Kentucky, where his family had lived for several
generations; but his mother considered Virginia their true home
and took him every summer to Fairfax County, where one of his
earliest recollections was a visit to the stone foundations and ruined
chimneys of " Pleasant Hill," the family " place " that had been
burnt in July, 1861, by General Blenkcr's New York "Dutch"
Brigade in the Union advance to First Manassas. Tate's education
18 Born in Winchester, Clark County, Kentucky, on November 19, 1899, the
youngest of the three sons of John Orley Tate and Eleanor Custis Varnell Tate,
he was soon recognized by his family as a different sort of child from his two
brothers. His father, a lumberman, had been brought up in Jefferson County on
the farm of his grandfather, John Robert Allen. A native of Sumner County,
Tennessee, Allen had misdated to Kentucky as a young man; the paternal grand-
father, James Johnston Tate, a schoolmaster "with a Bible in one hand and a
Latin grammar in the other," had come out from South Carolina about 1840.
His mother had spent most of her girlhood in Washington, and part of it in
St. Louis and southern Illinois, where an antislavery branch of her mother's
family had come from Virginia in the 1840*5; but the family was of Fairfax
County, Virginia, the land Tate has since portrayed in his novel The Fathers
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1938). The boy's early education, like that
of most of the Fugitives, was received at home. There were many books around
him, among them popular histories and the standard Scott and Dickens, but for
the rest the indiscriminate choice of a mother who read a novel a day for years,
with no particular literary taste. There were some books from the library of
his great-grandfather, Major Benjamin Lewis Bogan (1795-1870), who had
edited the Alexandria (Virginia) Gazette for a while in the 1850*5; one of these,
the two-volume 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, with corrections of Words-
worth's grammar in his great-grandfather's hand, Tate was to prize in later life.
In 1906, when he was six years old, Tate came with his mother and two
brothers, Ben and Varnell, to Nashville, where the older boys entered Vanderbilt.
In the normal course, the older brothers would have gone to Centre College in
Kentucky or the University of Virginia, and Allen would have followed. But
largely through the influence of their mother's cousin, William Pinkerton Ott, a
young mathematics instructor at Vanderbilt, they were persuaded to make the
choice upon which the future of their little brother, at any rate, was to depend.
Two years later, Tate was placed in the third grade in the Tarbox School, Nash-
villehis first school; the next year, in Louisville, at the Cross School, a private
" classical academy," he learned his first Latin declensions and conjugations, and
read some of Cornelius Nepos' Lives, when he was ten. His haphazard education
added up all told to only twelve years, including the four at Vanderbilt.
His brothers had been out of Vanderbilt several years when Allen was ready
for high school in 1914. After a year at the Ashland High School his prepara-
Disruption, Reassembly, and the Turn to Poetry 37
had been gained in a patchwork of public and private schools, the
Georgetown Preparatory School in Washington being the one im-
mediately preceding Vanderbilt. He was well prepared in lan-
guages, but for his mathematics was forced to hire a tutor the
later well-known medieval scholar, Dorothy Bethurum who suc-
cessfully " crammed " him for the entrance examination. When he
entered college, he was not greatly interested in literature, although
he had written a few verses. Except for his Greek course, taught
by Professor Tolman, Tate's first year at Vanderbilt produced
meager fruit. He found mathematics intolerable and dropped
chemistry; and neither his English nor his Latin courses were
engrossing enough to make up for what the others cost in boredom.
But Tolman's nobility of character and genuine erudition im-
pressed him, and his breadth of vision permanently interested
Tate in the study of the classics.
During his sophomore year Tate's interest in his college work
grew more lively. He took two English courses one under Mims,
the other under Curry. Though Tate somewhat scorned Mims, he
respected Curry, who, recognizing a brilliant student, lent him
books, talked to him about literature, and made his bachelor
quarters at Kissam available to him. But it was not so much his
English courses that started Tate on the path toward real learning
as a philosophy course under the man whom he was to consider
the most powerful teacher he ever had. It was " Cocky " Sanborn's
encyclopedic learning and particular interest in aesthetics that
awakened Tate to the natural bent of his own mind. Tate took
all of Sanborn's courses from then on.
In his junior year Tate was invited to join the Calumet Club
tory education was irregular, comprising only three years, with a part of a
year at the high school in Evansville, Indiana, where his father's business
brought the family for a brief period; then in 1917 his mother entered him in
the Georgetown University Preparatory School, from which he entered Vanderbilt
the next year. Tate's maternal grandfather had graduated in law from George-
town University in 1852; in fact, a near cousin of this grandfather, the Reverend
Francis Neale, S. J., had been the second president of the University, succeeding
the founder, John Carroll; and Tate's mother and her sisters had been sent to
the adjoining Gonvent of the Visitation in the 1870'$ and i88o's.
38 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
(of which he became president in 1921), where he enjoyed the
company of Ransom, Curry, Davidson, Stevenson, and other less
specifically literary members. The Calumet Club was then spon-
soring a humor magazine, and in its pages Tate published a poem
modeled on Villon, "A Ballade of the Lugubrious Wench," 19
which contained some small portent of its author's later poetic
ability. It was after this time that Davidson, chatting with Tate
on the steps of College Hall, invited him to come to a meeting of
the discussion group. Tate later entertainingly recorded this first
visit in his personal recollection of The Fugitive. The atmosphere
was not primarily literary, he recalled, but philosophic and
linguistic:
We had two hosts, Mr. James Frank, a cultivated businessman of
Nashville, and his brother-in-law, Dr. Sidney Mttron Hirsch, a man
of vast if somewhat perverse erudition; and it was plain that I had been
invited to hear him talk. He was a mystic and I think a Rosicrucian, a
great deal of whose doctrine skittered elusively among imaginary ety-
mologies. At that time I was not very consciously a poet. I was studying
Greek and Sanskrit, and if I had behaved myself I should no doubt
have gone the next year to the American School at Athens. But I
had not studied Hebrew, and I never knew what Dr. Hirsch's middle
name, Mttron, meant; I understood that it might be an archangel. He
was a large man, an invalid who never moved from his chaise longue,
and he always presided at our meetings. On this first evening he asked
me what I knew about the Trojan horse. My answer must have seemed
to him ignorant, for he brushed it aside and went on to explain that
woode in Middle English meant "mad," and that the Trojan horse
being the wooden horse must be the mad horse; and that since madness
is divine, the Trojan horse is the esoteric and symbolic horse. Shining
pince-nez stood up on his handsome nose, and curled Assyrian hair
topped a massive brow. 20
Tate did not recall how many men were present that evening, but
he remembered that all that winter five or six men were in " con-
stant attendance " at Hirsch's chaise longue. His characterizations
19 [O. A. T.] Jade, III, No. i (November 12, 1921), 17.
"The Fugitive 1922-1925," loc. cit., 76.
Disruption, Reassembly, and the Turn to Poetry 39
of them are significant: there were Stanley Johnson, "a man who
would stand no nonsense from anybody and who wrote some good
verse"; Alec Stevenson, who "after the first year of ... [the]
meetings wrote less and less; but he wrote some beautiful things
that should have long ago gone into a book "; Walter Clyde Curry,
who was a "sympathetic friend and a sonneteer who could write
good lines but he was not committed to poetry "; the Starr brothers,
Milton and Alfred; 21 and of course Davidson and Ransom:
Uppermost in my mind are Donald Davidson and John Crowe
Ransom, who for me, at that early age, meant just about everything.
Don was writing what I suppose were his first poems; they were about
lovers and dragons, and there was one about a tiger-woman that I
thought was remarkable; but Don's own liking for this sort of thing
declined at about the time mine did; and in the summer of 1922 he
began to write poems that I think are still among his best. John
Ransom always appeared at the Fugitive meetings with a poem (some
of us didn't), and when his turn came he read it in a dry tone of
understatement. I can only describe his manner in those days as irony
which was both brisk and bland. Before we began to think of a
magazine John had written a poem which foreshadowed the style for
which he has become famous; it was " Necrological," still one of his
best poems; I marvelled at it because it seemed to me that overnight
he had left behind him the style of his first book and, without con-
fusion, had mastered a new style. We all knew that John was far
better than we were, and although he never asserted his leadership we
looked to him for advice. 22
It is perhaps not odd that Tate should have caused a change
in the company. Bolder than the others, younger, more dedicated
to " modernism," his incisive mind provided from the beginning an
unsettling influence to which Ransom and Davidson were quick to
react. The exchange of energy between these three men was enor-
81 Milton Starr, a mathematician, did not remain in Nashville and so was
never a member of the Fugitives. Alfred Starr, who was to become a local movie
magnate, was listed as a member in the final issue of the magazine. Neither man
was a regular attendant at meetings.
"'"Hie Fugitive 1922-1925," Joe. cit., 77-78.
40 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
mous, setting up an interior movement within the group, the direc-
tion of which was unnoticed by some of the members, resented by
some, and immensely exciting to others. And it was at this turning
point that the ones " committed to poetry," to use Tate's phrase,
began to work with a new sense of power and importance.
This new sense of direction that began to reveal itself in the
men meeting at the Franks* could perhaps be viewed as part of
the revolt against nineteenth-century standards that was occurring
among serious poets everywhere, although to describe the Fugitive
movement as primarily revolt is to misunderstand the nature of
the milieu out of which it came. Growing out of friendship and
homogeneity of background, this poetic renaissance had its own
inner core of motive and depended far less upon a program of
attack than did the literary movements of Northern, Eastern, and
Midwestern contemporaries. But there was of course an element
of revolt in the thought of these poets, and, although they were to
find as they went along that it would turn against liberalism,
scientific naturalism, and the Romantic anti-intellectual aesthetic,
in the beginning they recognized only a distaste for the spurious-
ness of many of the emotions by which they were surrounded.
They were unable any longer to mouth the large ideals that were
to the Victorians the stuff of poetry.
It was only through breaking with " Southern literature," as
it was then piously conceived, that they could find the way to
what they realized years later was the genuine Southern tradition.
In its literary practice the South was still split by the two apparently
antithetical attitudes which had been defined during the period
from 1870 to 1900: Old South versus New South. Defeat had
routed Southern authors in two directions, along two paths of
escape one into the golden age of the past, " the sweetest, purest,
most beautiful civilization" America had produced, according to
Thomas Nelson Page; the other into the industrially prosperous
Utopia of the future, away from what Walter Hines Page described
as the " ghosts " that were strangling the South. Yet, though by the
period following the World War the two philosophies still had
their separate adherents, they were more and more functioning as
Disruption, Reassembly, and the Turn to Poetry 41
one, since both were based on an uncritical devotion to the South
and on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of literature.
The romantic diction, the use of local color, the essential senti-
mentality inherent in the liberal conception of man these all com-
bined in the beginning of the 1920*8 to produce a sickly stream
possessing only the hollowness of an inherited pose to designate it
as literature at all. The charge made by the incorrigible H. L.
Mencken did not seem far wrong: "Down there," he wrote, "a
poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or
a metaphysician." 23
Mencken could not know, of course, that at the time he made
his statement there was meeting in the South a group of poets who
were to change the whole course of Southern and indeed Ameri-
canliterature. But it was with no consciousness of a program that
these men came together for their enjoyable evenings. Assembling
on Whitland Avenue, in the spacious brick home, the members
had taken on by now the affability of people who meet with relish
and mutual confidence. There, with the Franks' comfortable living
room and dining room thrown open and a log fire crackling, the
poems were read without apology and were given honest, detailed
criticism. Carbon copies of individual pieces were customarily
furnished by the authors, so that the audience might mark special
points during the reading. Usually, after all the poems were read,
a more general topic of discussion emerged naturally from the
specific criticisms; and this long debate on an aesthetic question
would last well into the next morning.
Mrs. Frank never joined in the conversation; she was self-
effacing, leaving the men to themselves except for talking with
them affectionately before the meeting and putting out food for
them usually hot chocolate, cake, and fruit, but sometimes more
elaborate concoctions such as steaming hot dishes of Creole eggs,
cold meats, little sandwiches, butter cookies, and various relishes.
And sometimes she sat on the back stairs, hearing the voices raised
in argument, knowing that the men gathered below were of no
" Prejudices, Second Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), 136.
42 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
ordinary breed, and savoring those precious moments when her
husband was supremely happy in the kind of company he deserved.
The knowledge that a meeting was coming up goaded most of
the friends into writing a poem for the occasion. It was not felt
to be quite sporting to come without one; so unless the Muse failed
entirely to give heed, each member of the circle appeared every
other Saturday around nine in the evening with his carbon copies
in his hand. Hirsch came in to his chaise, from where he presided,
and the meeting began always with some formality.
Though deference was paid to Hirsch, Ransom was the real
leader of the discussions. He was in his element in these meetings
charming, poised, sure of himself, scrupulously courteous. He sat
with a semi-smile on his lips most of the time, maintaining always
a gentlemanlincss that could not be shattered. He was detached
in his thinking, and his effect in an argument was always toward
sound logic. " You're in the wrong compartment," he would say to
an opponent who seemed to him wronghcaded. As Davidson has
recalled him, ". . . always he was, as he politely declared at many a
Fugitive meeting, ' literal-minded 'a term he used just before
rending to bits with calm, analytical pincers some too airy fancy
one of us had bounced into in a mere fit of rhyme." 2 * But he never
condescended; he welcomed honest criticism. Under such austere
guidance, about the fire those winter nights of 1921, each member
discovered for himself a world that seemed more real and more
exciting than any he had heretofore inhabited. The language of
this new world was poetry; and each member knew that before he
could declare himself by means of it, he must practice, criticize,
and revise.
14 Southern Writers in the Modem World, 8.
CHAPTER THREE
JJ^fJ\!J\^^
THE BIRTH OF
THE FUGITIVE:
SPRING, 1922
THE MAGAZINE which was to its founders
a sudden and daring venture appears in retrospect as a near inevita-
bility; in the twenties, when eight flourishing young poets came
together, the issue of the combination was likely to be a "little
magazine." Particularly in the South was the third decade of the
twentieth century the time for a literary burgeoning, there having
appeared in one year 1921 three important new journals in dif-
ferent parts of the South: The Double Dealer in New Orleans,
The Reviewer in Richmond, and The Lyric in Norfolk.
The Nashville poets knew their own work was as seriously
executed as most of the current poetry being printed in America;
but they might not have begun their own publication without
Sidney Hirsch's urging. Hirsch was acquainted with a number of
recognized writers, one of whom, Witter Bynner, in Nashville to
speak at the Centennial Club, had come to a meeting at the Franks'.
Impressed with the poetry he heard there, Bynner predicted that
43
44 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
an audience could be found for a publication by the group, which
was made up now of Ransom, Davidson, Tate, Johnson, Stevenson,
Curry, Frank, and Hirsch.
Some time in March, 1922, Hirsch broached the idea of a
magazine. The other members were heartily in favor of the project,
and half-seriously Alec Stevenson suggested as title The Fugitive,
after a poem of Hirsch's which had been read and discussed at an
earlier meeting. They knew that the name would invite ridicule,
as Allen Tate later wrote; but since they could not hope to escape
teasing, they settled down cheerfully to answer the frequently
encountered question concerning the reason for their flight. Ac-
cording to Tate, Hirsch's "most erudite irony was turned upon
these jests. For a Fugitive was quite simply a Poet: the Wanderer,
or even the Wandering Jew, the Outcast, the man who carries the
secret wisdom around the world." 1
It has been tempting to critics of Fugitive poetry to regard this
title with great seriousness and, to many, it convicts these poets of
"escapism." But such an interpretation underestimates the sup-
porting framework of Southern manners and sociability, into which,
as persons, the Fugitives fitted not uncomfortably. If, as writers,
they saw themselves fleeing from anything, it was from sentimen-
tality, which in the South was encountered in literature more than
in life. In the preface to the first issue, Ransom wrote, "THE
FUGITIVE flees from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brah-
mins of the Old South." 2 And, a year after the first publication,
Davidson enlarged upon this interpretation : " If there is a signifi-
cance in the title of the magazine," he wrote to Corra A. Harris, of
the Charlotte Daily Observer, " it lies perhaps in the sentiment of
the editors (on this point I am sure we all agree) to flee from the
extremes of conventionalism, whether old or new. They hope to
keep in touch with and to utilize in their work the best qualities
of modern poetry, without at the same time casting aside as un-
worthy all that is established as good in the past." 8
1M The fugitive 1922-1925," loc. cit., 79.
2 Foreword, The Fugitive, I, No. i [April, 1922], i.
1 Unpublished MS., March 10, 1923.
The Birth of The Fugitive: Spring, 1922, 45
To the group, the idea of attempting a magazine seemed, Tate
wrote, " a project of the utmost temerity, if not of folly." 4 But the
Hirsch circle was not over-modest; the members had developed a
method of criticism that strengthened their confidence, and each
respected his own ability. They were never to function actually as
a unit; their thinking was too strongly individual for real group
action; yet by 1922 they had decided on a few points to which
they all gave assent. Primarily poetry must not be sentimental; it
must not be obvious; 5 and it must be intellectual as well as emo-
tional, the product of what Ransom was later to call " not the act
of a child ... but the act of an adult mind." 6 Other than in this
tacit understanding, the criticism at Fugitive meetings was always
essentially unsystematic, the members pronouncing with conviction
upon each other's work and with just as much conviction ignoring
or heeding the pronouncements.
For the magazine, the poets decided to use pseudonyms, " less
for concealment," Tate wrote later, " than for the ' romance '...." 7
Humor and a wry self -judgment were responsible for most of the
choices of names. "Roger Prim," for instance, reveals Ransom's
basic awareness of his own formal and reticent temperament, as
Davidson's "Robin Gallivant" evidences a lyric flair. "Henry
Feathertop," Tate's name, was chosen from Hawthorne's story
" Feathertop," in Mosses from an Old Manse, as a gesture, one can
surmise, of both love and mockery toward himself. 8 The signifi-
cance of neither Curry's "Marpha" nor Frank's "Philora" is
immediately apparent, though perhaps Frank's pen name was
intended to suggest its owner's philological tendencies; and Sidney
* "The Fugitive 1922,-! 92 5," Zoc. cit., 79.
5 As Stevenson wrote in a letter to Tate (August 27, 1933), quoting Ransom
at a Fugitive meeting, ". . . it is the Fugitive habit never to name the Thing,
to paint all the picture except the central figure."
8 The World's Body (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1938), viii.
7 "The Fugitive 1922-1925," Zoc. cit., 80.
8 The Feathertop of the story, a straw man given by witchcraft life but no
wits, saw himself for the " wretched, ragged, empty thing " he was, a perception
which led to his destruction. But as his witch mother asked, "Why should
my poor puppet be the only one to know himself and perish for it? "
46 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Hirsch's " L. Oafer," superficially a pun on Hirsch's lack of voca-
tion, probably possessed a far more profound and obscure meaning
known only to its originator. Stanley Johnson in his "Jonathan
David " fused the names of a famous pair of friends, perhaps as an
indication of his forthright conviction that he was his own best
friend. Stevenson's " Drimlonigher " is the name of a county in
north Ireland, the birthplace of his father; and his second pseudo-
nym, adopted for the second issue, was " King Badger," based on
his middle name (Brock), which in Celtic means badger. This
romantic and playful gesture of the Fugitives has no real impor-
tance in itself; it is, however, indicative of their love for word-play
and for speculation concerning the derivation and archaic use of
words. Much of the Fugitive poetry is full of the peculiar, little-
known diction of amateur linguists; indeed, the curious and eager
attention which they gave to the historical aspect of meaning,
imbedded in the patterns of words, is responsible for one part of
the distinct flavor of their poetry.
The poems comprising the first fugitive were selected by vote; 9
* Davidson has preserved the record of that first important ballot-casting on
the back of a letter written to him by Chancellor Kirkland in reply to Davidson's
application for a university apartment. Kirkland stated that rentals were not
considered solely on the basis of order of application. (March 10, 1922).
Davidson did not get the apartment, a fact which Tate says should have told
him he was a poet ("The Fugitive 1922-1925," loc. cit. t 80). The pencilled
figures on the back of the letter record the number of votes each poem received
and, as a practical matter, the number of lines in each poem:
L'Egoist 8
Sermons 8
I Have Not Lived 7
The Dragon Book 7
The Demon Brother 7
To a Wise Man 7
Following the Tiger 6
Imprisonment 6
House of Beauty 6
Tribute to Int D 5
To a Lady on her B 5
Night Voices 5
Intellectual's Funeral 5
Burial at Sea 4
44
Ransom
18
Johnson
14
Curry
32
Davidson
46
Davidson
14
Stevenson
60
Davidson
M
Stevenson
M
Stevenson
55
Tate
55
Ransom
50
Ransom
15
Johnson
The Birth of The Fugitive: Spring, 1922 47
and, because the money for the enterprise was coming out of their
own pockets, the young poets took their manuscripts to the most
inexpensive printer they could find, a Negro who operated a small
press in an upstairs shop.
Allen Tate, the only undergraduate connected with the maga-
zine, was assigned the chief task of enlisting support for it, but
all the members were drafted into service. Each was expected to
round up as many likely prospects as he could muster, the aim
being to obtain both subscriptions and publicity. For instance, as
soon as the first issue was printed, Alec Stevenson renewed his
friendship with Felix Morley, then at Oxford, by sending a copy
of the new journal and a letter requesting a dollar for a year's
subscription. He explained the motives of the new enterprise:
" Our sole purposes are to demonstrate that all the good poetry is
not being published by the arrogant and high-priced magazines,
and that poetry is not written solely in California, Indiana, and the
effete New York." 10
Tate tried unsuccessfully to sell Chancellor Kirkland a subscrip-
tion; as a matter of fact, the Chancellor never became a subscriber
to the magazine, even after it had attracted a good deal of national
attention. Of the university's attitude Tate later wrote,
While the Fugitive poets were read in the editorial offices of the
NOUVELLE REVUE FRANCAISE in Paris, they were gently ridiculed
in the suburbs of Nashville; while they were well-known at the Univer-
sities of Oxford and Cambridge, they were a petty nuisance on the
campus of Vanderbilt .... this intellectual movement never received
the slightest official recognition or encouragement from the adminis-
tration. 11
According to Tate, Mims also discouraged the venture, inviting
the poets to lunch and trying to dissuade them from publishing:
His general view was, I believe, that if we were good we could be
published in the Eastern journals. His emphasis as a teacher was on the
10 Unpublished MS., April 14, 1922.
11 Letter to Editor, The Alumnus, XXVI, No. 5 (March, 1941)* 15-
48 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
New England writers of the past century, and there was not much said
about Southern letters since Sidney Lanier. The necessity to import
culture was the doctrine I heard in Dr. Minis' classes, and it is the
doctrine preached in his The Advancing South, a book published
several years after the Fugitive movement had begun. 12
Quite naturally Mims, as head of the English department, would
encounter some resentment among the younger men if he attempted
to advise caution; and just as naturally he could not be expected
to crusade for something of which he could not wholly approve
the experimental aspect of Fugitive verse. He did praise the group
frequently in public addresses, and he himself subscribed to the
magazine and elicited other subscriptions from friends; but the
most important contribution Mims made to the Fugitives was to
value creative writing as highly as scholarship in his own depart-
ment, so that some of the Fugitives were provided with the means
whereby to live and the inestimable privilege of teaching literature
in their own way.
Thus, in spite of their lack of sponsorship perhaps even rather
glad at not possessing the encumbrance of commitments Ransom,
Davidson, and the others went ahead cheerfully with their plans
for the first issue. When the initial number appeared, it an-
nounced no program; the only explanatory words accompanying it
were in Ransom's ironic tone:
Foreword
Official exception having been taken by the sovereign people to the
mint julep, a literary phase known rather euphemistically as Southern
Literature has expired, like any other stream whose source is stopped up.
The demise was not untimely: among other advantages THE FUGITIVE
is enabled to come to birth in Nashville, Tennessee, under a star not
entirely unsympathetic. THE FUGITIVE flees from nothing faster than
from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South. Without raising the
question of whether the blood in the veins of its editors runs red, they
at any rate are not advertising it as blue; indeed, as to pedigree, they
cheerfully invite the most unfavorable inference from the circumstances
of their anonymity.
11 Ibid.
The Birth of The Fugitive: Spring, 1922 49
THE FUGITIVE is of very limited circulation, and is supported by
subscriptions at the rate of one dollar per subscriber. It will appear at
intervals of one month or more, till three to five numbers have been
issued. Beyond that point the editors, aware of the common mortality,
do not venture to publish any hopes they may entertain for the infant
as to a further tenure of this precarious existence.
This epigrammatic manifesto accomplished the not unremarkable
feat in the South during the early part of the twentieth century
of proclaiming the freedom of its editors from partisanship. In
fact, so free from apparent policy was this first issue that its
readers must have been slightly puzzled at the intentions of a
group of poets who went to the trouble and expense of publishing
a magazine with no program.
And yet, the first poem in the issue, Ransom's " Ego/' is a kind
of apologia for the whole Fugitive temperament, as well as for
Ransom's own complex sensibility. Beginning
You have heard something muttered in my scorn:
" A little learning addleth this man's wit,
He crieth on our dogmas Counterfeit!
And no man's bubble 'scapeth his sharp thorn,"
the poem refers specifically to the local misunderstanding that had
arisen from the publication of Poems about God\ but in a larger
sense it concerns the whole aura of misunderstanding and distrust
with which a poet finds himself surrounded, perhaps at any time
but particularly in the South in the 1920*8. Another element mani-
fests itself, however, later in the poem: Ransom was apparently
aware that even with his poet friends he was subject to some
misconstruction. From the sixth stanza on, accordingly, the poem
is addressed to them:
Friends! come acquit me of the stain of pride:
Much has been spoken solemnly together
And you have heard my heart; so answer whether
I am so proud a Fool, and godless beside.
Sages and friends, too often have you seen us
50 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Deep in the midnight conclave as we used;
For my part reverently were you perused;
No rank or primacy being hatched between us;
For my part much beholden to you all,
Giving a little and receiving more;
Learning had stuffed this head with but lean lore
Betwixt the front bone and the occipital;
Anatomy, that doled these dubious features,
Had housed within me, close to my breast-bone,
My Demon, always clamoring Up, Begone,
Pursue your gods faster than most of creatures;
So I take not the vomit where they do,
Comporting downwards to the general breed;
I have run further, matching your heat and speed,
And tracked the Wary Fugitive with you;
And if an alien, miserably at feud
With those my generation I have reason
To think to salve the fester of my treason:
A seven of friends exceeds much multitude.
Though this piece lacks the dramatic framework that Ransom later
used to give aesthetic distance to his work (the speaker here is
undoubtedly Ransom, addressing the other Fugitives), it exhibits
the wry, pedantic, and sharply metaphorical flavor to be found in
his poems throughout the course of The Fugitive. His other poems
in the issue are less successful, though in " To a Lady Celebrating
her Birthday" there is expressed some of the tender irony with
which Ransom came later to view the poetic object, particularly in
the passage:
Bring only tokens fixed and sure:
Bring kind affections, merited deep and strong,
And though poor hearts never have lasted long,
Swear splendidly to how they shall perdure
As true as now, as pure.
Davidson's poems, although not so critical in attitude nor so
interesting in texture as Ransom's, display more metrical compe-
The Birth of The Fugitive: Spring, 1922 51
tence. " A Demon Brother," later to be called " An Outland Piper,"
shows a lyric symbolism not unlike Yeats's:
Old Man, what are you looking for?
Why do you tremble so, at the window peering in?
A brother of mine! That's what I'm looking for!
Someone I sought and lost of noble kin.
Davidson's other poems in the issue are of less sturdy stuff; but
all of them, his earliest serious poems, reveal what was to become
later his dominant theme: the individual's profound sense of loss in
the modern world. His poetic method was to change radically,
and his own understanding of the nature of the bereavement was
to deepen; nevertheless, for all their romantic imagery, these early
poems are not poems of " escape " but of a search for a rightful
heritage.
Of Tate's two poems, one" Sinbad "is an unfinished Brown-
ingesque dramatic monologue; the other" To Intellectual Detach-
ment "is more unusual in its language and metaphor:
This is the man who classified the bits
Of his friends' hells into a pigeonhole-
He hung each disparate anguish on the spits
Parboiled and roasted in his own withering soul.
God give him peace! He gave none other peace.
His conversation glided on the brain
Like a razor honing the promise of one's decease-
Smooth like cold steel, yet feeling without pain;
And as his art, disjected from his mind,
Was utterly a tool, so it possessed him;
A passionate devil, informed in humankind,
It turned on him he's dead. Shall we detest him?
This last stanza exhibits, as Tate later commented, the influence
of E. A. Robinson; but some of the lines earlier in the poem show
the ability, unusual in a young poet, to construct conceits that are
intense yet worked out with keen analysis.
One of the most consistently maintained poems in the issue
52 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
is Johnson's " An Intellectual's Funeral." Its lines are vigorous and
strong:
On such a day we put him in a box
And carried him to that last house, the grave;
All round the people walked upon the streets
Without once thinking that he had gone.
Their hard heels clacked upon the pavement stones.
A voiceless change had muted all his thoughts
To a deep significance we could not know;
And yet we knew that he knew all at last.
We heard with grave wonder the falling clods,
And with grave wonder met the loud day.
The night would come and day, but we had died.
With new green sod the melancholy gate
Was closed and locked, and we went pitiful.
Our clacking heels upon the pavement stones
Did knock and knock for Death to let us in.
In many ways this is a remarkable poem; for one thing, it is the
best of Johnson's ever to appear in the magazine. More noteworthy
is the fact that its diction manifests a seasoned colloquialism which
to later readers must inevitably suggest the influence of John
Ransom. Johnson's other two poems in the issue, however, are
greatly inferior to " An Intellectual's Funeral."
The three sonnets Stevenson contributed to the first issue are
smoothly competent and polished. Some echoes of George Mere-
dith sound through a few lines of "Imprisonment" with im-
pressive force:
The lightning feet of years appalled her heart,
Swift days that left a restless love uncrowned;
She sighed, and smiled at me with piteous art,
Wishing for ending, death, or sleep as sound.
Curry's poetry, too, uses the sonnet form as cultivated gentlemen
always have in an elegant but not wholly serious expression of
themselves. And yet his " I Have Not Lived " is distinguished by
The Birth of The Fugitive: Spring, 1922 53
a diction seasoned with a tentative wry irony, as evidenced in the
beginning lines:
Though half my years besiege the aged sun,
I have not lived. My robust preparation
Lags tardily behind fit consummation,
Droops swcatily in courses just begun.
Actually, Hirsch's " The Little Boy Pilgrim " is the one unpromis-
ing poem in the journal. In its romantic lyricism it is untouched by
the caustic action of thought, assigning to the poet the role of the
simple, innocent child:
I am the little boy pilgrim,
I wander the wold and the sea,
And far past the reach of the star rim
I mingle my mad minstrelsy.
This account of the naive wisdom of the child-mystic continues
for seven stanzas, concluding:
And all that I saw in the heavens,
And all that I see here between,
There's nothing so funny for laughing
As the sense that is common and queen.
Though of course immature if judged by the standards set
later by members of the group, this first issue of The Fugitive
possessed a good share of intrinsic merit. None of its individual
verses, perhaps, were up to the quality of the really good poems to
be found sporadically in some of the established journals, such as
The Dial, The Little Review, Poetry, or even The Double Dealer,
but its totality was better than that of most other literary magazines
in America. It lacked the saccharine notes often encountered in
Poetry and the wilfully neurotic tone of The Little Review or
Secession. In short, it was an obviously serious effort made by men
of intellect and talent.
The Nashville papers were willing enough at first to play up
the journal. The Tennessean adopted a sprightly tone: "Literary
54 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Nashville has a new sport chasing ' The Fugitive/ " 13 But be-
yond making a few arch comments about the " unpretentious little
volume " and referring to its literary merit as a " sensation," this
news article made no attempt to review the magazine. A more
serious review in the Sunday Tennessean (written by a Vanderbilt
alumna) praised especially Davidson's work. The reviewer singled
out Ransom also for commendation, and in the process revealed
something of the local reaction to Ransom's published volume of
poetry: "Roger Prim is easily recognizable, incongruous as his
nom de plume may seem with some of the more rabid ' Poems
about God/" 14
On the same day the Banner also devoted considerable space
to a review of the new journal. The anonymous reviewer was
guarded in his commendation:
The poetical work contained in " The Fugitive " is not in general,
one would judge, the product of the amateur hand, and more than one
of the selections contained therein bears such marks that the identity
of the writer seems bound to be a rather open secret. If any general
criticism of an adverse nature were to be attempted, in fact, it would
probably be to the general effect that the little volume was somewhat
smothered in the technicalities of verse writing with a subsequent
loss of spontaneity. 15
The Fugitive should be received sympathetically for two reasons,
he felt: first, its poetry possessed "real merit/' and second, the
volume might fill " a very much-needed want in the literary life
of the community."
These first local notices give hints of the ambivalent attitude
which Nashville literary people were to adopt toward the work of
the Fugitives. " The Athens of the South " could well afford to
furnish the soil for one poetic shoot of the Southern literary
flourishing; consequently local pride dictated a welcome to the
Muse. But townspeople did not expect her to be garbed in such
11 April 13, 1922, afternoon edition.
"April 16, 1922.
"April 1 6, 1922.
The Birth of The Fugitive: Spring, 1922 55
peculiar robes or to speak in a tone of such forbidding intellectu-
ality. They were uncomfortable, therefore, and hid their uncer-
tainty in facetiousness.
The appearance of The Fugitive caused great excitement in
some circles on the university campus. Those who were writing
poetry themselves were aware of the magazine as a possible outlet
for their own pieces if they had no other interest in it. The college
newspaper, The Hustler, feared that the magazine was "beyond
the grasp of the average Philistine of the campus," but it never-
theless commended " die spirit of the enterprise." 16 But it was the
Vanderbilt humor magazine, The Jade, listing O. A. Tate as one
of its editors, that gave The Fugitive the only serious attention it
received on campus. In a lengthy editorial devoted to The fugitive,
the Jade editors applauded the courage and talent behind the
journal. After explaining that the new publication represented an
attempt to discard the post-bellum Southern attitudes, The Jade
column concluded: " THE JADE can do no more than heartily wel-
come this new spirit in the South. It is, in our opinion, the spirit
that the South has always really had, but sentiment and ignorance
have obscured it for so long a time that this small group of serious
thinkers is virtually staging a modern renaissance." 1T
Another Jade editor, Merrill Moore, four years younger than
Tate, was greatly impressed with the Fugitive display of talent.
He encountered Tate on the campus soon after the issue was out
and thrust into his hands a poem called " To a Fetish," wondering
if it would entitle him to membership in the group. Tate thought
the poem "wonderful" and took it straight to Davidson. 18 It
appeared in the second issue of the magazine, one of the best poems
that Moore ever produced. From that time on, he attended Fugitive
meetings and enlivened them in his own highly individual fashion.
Moore was brilliant, erratic, vague, and absent-minded; as Alec
Stevenson has said, " He could listen in on the stream of his own
16 Undated clipping.
17 III, No. 4 (April 13, 1922). Tate does not remember who wrote this
" very perceptive " review; at any rate, he did not.
18 "T7ie Fugitive 1922-1925," Zoc. cit., 78.
56 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
consciousness." Davidson has recorded his recollections of Moore
as he was during the early days of The Fugitive:
When I first came to know Merrill Moore, he was an odd, gangling
youngster well along in his 'teens, uncertain of his arms and legs, a
little hollow-chested and spindling, with a sparse reddish beard just
sprouting on his chin to match the shock of red hair on his head. He
materialized as he has a way of doing in English classes at Vanderbilt
University without anybody's realizing at first that his quiet presence
meant anything unusual. But in no time at all he arrived, in the
manner of his genius that we afterwards found to be as natural to him
as getting up in the morning, at the local center of things at least at
what was to some poets at Nashville a center exciting and sufficient
enough for the time being. The " Fugitives " were then just beginning
their poetical enterprise, and somebody it was cither John Crowe
Ransom or Allen Tate discovered that Merrill Moore wrote poetry
and brought him out to a meeting. His verses from the very first
had the distinction that is peculiarly his; he was his own mythologist,
and was capable of expanding the tiniest figment of name or fancy into
an exciting lyric form, which in those days might be free or traditional
verse with equal catholicity. Merrill Moore's apprenticeship was brief
indeed; he became a member of the circle at a time early enough to
select for himself a pseudonym according to the Fugitive fashion of
those days. 19
The pen name he selected fitted him aptly. As Tate pointed out,
"Dendric" is the Greek root for tree 9 with the suffix added to
make the meaning tree-like. " But if Merrill was like a tree," Tate
remarked, " the tree was a dense fern of the primordial tropics." 20
Actually, Moore's name was probably related to his premedical
study of cell structure, the tree-like formations of nervecells, den-
drites, more than likely being involved in his choice.
Davidson wrote further of Moore's enormous capacity for get-
ting things done: he attended Fugitive meetings, helped edit the
magazine, finished his degree, taught at Watkins Institute (a Nash-
ville night school for adults) kept up his social life, and managed
" Unpublished MS.
**"The fugitive 1922-1925," loc. eft., 80.
The Birth of The Fugitive: Spring, 192.2 57
somehow to have spare time for small talkall the while writing
a prodigious amount of poetry. In fact, editorial committees learned
to depend on Moore's verses " as a sort of goodly staple that one
looks to be always on hand plenteously as salt and bread and water
at a meal. Whatever gaps others left, through the failure of inspira-
tion or lack of confidence, Merrill Moore could be counted on to
fill generously out of his great abundance." 21 The strange thing
about Moore as poet was his curiously offhand attitude toward his
verse: unlike most of the other Fugitives particularly Ransom,
Davidson, and Tatc he gave no thought to fame or to the questions
of the origins and nature of poetry. " It was enough for him,"
Davidson recorded, " to print his poems in The Fugitive, to which
he gave a passionate devotion."
Moore had entered Vanderbilt in the fall of 1920, after having
graduated from Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville. 22 In
college, when he became interested in writing, it was the portrayal
of personality in verse that attracted him. Of his own method he
later wrote: "I found that sometimes when I got a sonnet past
the first three or four lines it would pick up some sort of momentum
of its own and might then go on writing itself, impelled by associ-
ations and guided partly by rhyme. Some poems even got out of
control and proceeded to write themselves after the first line/' 2S
ul Davidson, MS.
32 Born September u, 1903, in Columbia, Tennessee, the son of John
Trotwood Moore and the former Mary Brown Daniel, Austin Merrill Moore
had a surprisingly traditional heritage for a boy so unconventional. His father, a
local writer of the old school, had chosen Trotwood as a pen name (from
David Copper field) and finally added it to his official signature. A native of
Marion, Alabama, he had come to Maury County, Tennessee, in 1885, where on
his farm near Columbia he raised blooded stock and wrote articles for the local
paper and for the Chicago Horse Review. He was a lover of fine horses and of
the old Southern chivalric trappings, and he turned to the writing of fiction out
of a desire to portray the middle Tennessee country which he knew and admired.
In 1897 he published Songs and Stories from Tennessee (Chicago: J. C. Bauer,
1897) and in 1901 his first novel, A Summer Hymnal C Philadelphia: H. T.
Coates and Co., 1901). Several more novels followed; but from 1919 on, after
his move to Nashville and appointment as director for the state libraries and
archives, he turned his efforts largely to Tennessee history.
11 " Note to the Reader," Clinical Sonnets (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1950), 5-
58 The fugitive Group: A Literary History
Because of this peculiar method and its accompanying phenomenon
a prolific output Moore was made a rule to himself at Fugitive
meetings: whereas the others had meticulously followed the custom
of bringing carbon copies of their poems for criticism, Moore was
released from what would have been the impossible task of pro-
viding copies of fifty or sixty poems. And in the matter of criticism
Moore was also accorded individual treatment:
When Merrills turn came to read, we simply leaned back in our
chairs and relaxed for a poetical debauch. Such hard, detailed criticism
as the Fugitives were in the habit of handing around to each other was
impossible in Merrill's case. If you attacked one poem, he retorted by
reading another one. From page to page of manuscript he would go,
reading casually and with no declamatory effect in his low-pitched,
husky voice, occasionally interspersing a murmured comment, " Maybe
this one is better," or "This is a series I wrote while waiting for a
car in the Transfer Station," always as if poetry were not something
to shout over and be pompous about, but to take naturally as intimate
conversation among friends. 24
But for all his otFhandedness, Moore was serious about his
poetry; and for all the goodnatured tolerance of the other Fugitives,
they were sometimes harshly critical of his hastily written lines.
Or ce, for a while, he was barred from the magazine, in the hope
that this punishment would force him to revise his work. But
finally there was nothing for his colleagues to do but accept him
as he was, in view of what they all recognized the amazing
fecundity of his poetic talent.
Life for the various Fugitives during this period was busy and
diverting. Ransom found pleasure with his numerous unliterary
friends in bridge and golf and at parties where guests played
hilarious and undignified parlor games. Alec Stevenson was occu-
pied with his friends and business acquaintances, and the Johnsons
and Davidsons went out together in a rickety old car which John-
son had acquired. Tate took part in the campus social affairs as
an unpredictable and slightly shocking leader. And Merrill Moore
14 Davidson, MS.
The Birth of The Fugitive: Spring, 1922 59
was always turning up in the house of any of his friends, making
himself completely at home, helping himself to whatever there
was on hand in the kitchen, always eating. Stevenson remembers
Moore's coming to his house one time with a banana in one hand
and a gold Buddha in the other, ostensibly to talk. But Stevenson
soon found out that the boy was hungry, and food proved more
sustaining at the time than a discussion of Oriental mysticism. Of
the group Curry alone lived in any sense a cloistered life. Although
he was intimate with the other Fugitives, reading and criticizing
their work, lending them books, talking with them in his room, he
took no part in their " social " lives. A rather reserved bachelor,
he was putting in long hours on his now famous Chaucer study,
Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences, which was to be completed
and published four years later. 25
But The fciigitive was for most of the members their most en-
ticing occupation. The second issue was assembled in great enthu-
siasm, with most of the group contributing considerable time and
effort to the job. Reactions to the first issue had been gratifying,
they thought; hence in the current number the editors expressed
their thanks to friends who had purchased all of the earlier copies,
placing the magazine " financially on a firm footing " and leading
the editors to " speculate hopefully about a policy of perpetuity."
These words occur at the end of " Caveat Emptor," Ransom's un-
signed prefatory comment which begins:
The editors of THE FUGITIVE are amateurs of poetry living in Nash-
ville, Tennessee, who for some time have been an intimate group
holding very long and frequent meetings devoted both to practice and
to criticism. The group mind is evidently neither radical nor reaction-
ary, but quite catholic, and perhaps excessively earnest, in literary
dogma. The writers sign their work with assumed names for the
present, with special reference to the local public, on the theory that
the literary issue must not be beclouded with personalities.
The contents were largely made up of poems the group had
on hand before the first number; consequently they were not its
88 New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1926.
60 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
strongest offerings. 20 Moore's poem adds to the quality of the
contents; but the lines of both Frank's " Fugitive Unbound " and
Hirsch's "The Horses of Hell" are unfortunately limp and in-
effectual. Davidson's musical lyrics are less evocative than the
ones in the April number, and Tate had not yet achieved anything
memorable in the way of style. One poem of Ransom's, however,
distinguished the issue: " Necrological," which had been written
earlier, but which, as Tate later commented, is the brilliant procla-
mation of a new style. 27
The poem is a dramatization of the vast disparity between the
moral and physical realms. In it a Carmelite friar who has " said
his paternosters duly " comes out of his monastery to find the field
around him " white like asphodel " with the bodies of dead war-
riors. The monk possesses himself of a blade, taken from "the
belly of a lugubrious wight ":
He fingered it well, and it was cunningly made;
But strange apparatus was it for a Carmelite.
The last stanza concludes:
Then he sat upon a hill and hung his head,
Riddling, riddling, and lost in a vast surmise,
And so still that he likened himself unto those dead
Whom the kites of heaven solicited with sweet cries.
The obvious lack of concern on the part of the natural world gives
pause to the friar, committed as he is to a belief in a personal God
who supposedly marks the sparrow's fall. He ends by sensing his
kinship with these dead, who are subject to the hazards of an un-
caring order. In the last line is implied the terrible difference
between a spiritual heaven, in which only loving-kindness can be
88 Stevenson's " Now this is Parting " and " More Than the Praise of Gods ";
Tate's " Call on, Deep Voice "; and Curry's " Grieve Not " had all been con-
sidered for the first publication. Many of the other poems had been written
earlier. Ransom's "Destitution Raiseth Her Voice" had been called originally
11 In Time of Industrial Depression," and his " The Sure Heart " had been, in
the voting during March, " As We Two Walked at Dawn."
* T "TJxe Fugitive 1922-1925," loc. cit., 77.
The Birth of The Fugitive: Spring, 1922 61
considered sweet, and a physical heaven, inhabited by vultures to
whom the ultimate violation of man is sweet indeed. Ransom's
ironic tone, his dramatic method, his dualistic theme, his quaintly
archaic web of language are utilized fully here. Lacking to the
poem are only the tenderness and the absolute mastery of phrase
achieved in Ransom's later verse.
A review of the issue in the Banner indicates the growth of an
attitude which Nashville at large and Vanderbilt itself would dis-
play increasingly toward The Fugitive. 2 * Signed by " Queen Bee,"
the article adopted an amusedly patronizing tone: "The chief
element of improvement [in the second issue] seems to be an added
amount of intelligibility, the first poem [sic] having been wrapped
in the mists of poetical technic or something until it was not easy
for the ordinary mortal to be very certain what they were all about."
After pointing out that the young authors took themselves and their
task exceedingly seriously, the disguised reviewer stated her serious
opinion at some length: The poems show the weaknesses of men
who have spent their lives in academic circles. This attitude is
distinctly "new" Southern, representing an anti-intellcctualism
which, after the, war, was becoming quite pronounced, even in a
city that had prided itself heretofore on its culture. The concluding
paragraph of the review was devoted to a prediction that The
Fugitive would never be "either popular or influential until it
adopts a more intelligent brand of subjects for its poetical effusions
and a more humanely understandable manner of dealing with
them." A Dallas paper voiced the same opinion in a review of the
issue, reprinting Tate's " A Scholar to His Lady," Hirsch's " The
Horses of Hell," and Johnson's " Bethel." Though this review was
seriously conceived and commendatory in tone, it nevertheless was
in accord with the Nashville reviewer in finding the poems too
greatly tainted by thought. 20
In England, William Elliott was boisterously sponsoring the
new project. At a lecture on modern American verse, delivered by
""June Fugitive Comes from Press/' July 15, 1922.
"The Dallas News, September 10, 1922.
62 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
John Gould Fletcher to a literary club at Oxford, Elliott was openly
and vocally shocked at the omission of Ransom from the list of
distinguished American poets. Writing of the incident fifteen
years later, Fletcher said, " I had repaired the omission, not only by
reading Ransom, but by becoming a subscriber and a contributor to
the original Fugitive magazine." 80 Elliott continued his publicity
campaign with other literary men at Oxford, as did Bill Frierson,
and wrote the group volunteering to obtain contributors and sub-
scribers for the magazine in England.
By the end of the school year, the Fugitives were convinced of
the seriousness of their involvement in the new project. In its
two issues the magazine had succeeded well enough to afford a
definite impetus to Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Johnson, each
of whom spent the following summer considering at length the
problems of the profession of letters. Ransom and Johnson stayed
in Nashville, teaching and studying; Davidson was in and out of
Nashville, though spending most of his time on the Cumberland
Bluffs near Lebanon, where he was counsellor at Camp Kawasawa.
Tate had found it necessary to leave school in May, just before he
would have graduated. He had shown some sign of a lung compli-
cation and was sent to Valle Crucis, North Carolina, for a rest. All
the others remained in Nashville and attended Fugitive sessions.
Even Curry came to the meetings, though he was busy with plans
for his fall trip to England, where he was to examine documents in
the Bodleian Library. Frierson and Elliott, back from Oxford, were
glad to be included in the group, bringing with them fresh en-
thusiasm for the project and dissenting voices for the poetry.
' Life Is My Song (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), 339.
CHAPTER FOUR
MyW^^
THE LINES DRAWN
WITHIN THE GROUP:
SUMMER AND FALL, 1922
IN THEIR ISOLATION during the summer, Tate
and Davidson were forced to turn in upon their own resources; each
read assiduously and worked at his writing with a new concern.
They were the only Fugitives who were solitary in this promising
summer so soon after their literary debut; and their correspondence,
at first casual, deepened into an increasingly important channel of
expression for both. In the North Carolina mountains, Tate was
missing the " daily literary gossip " in Nashville, 1 finding himself
not one to merge with the spirit of nature; and, in the hills near
Nashville, Davidson was trying to write a photoplay in an attempt
to ease his always bothersome financial pressure. Though he spent
long hours working on his scenariohe felt sure it would sell, since
it possessed the requisite melodrama 2 he nevertheless allowed him-
1 Unpublished MS., Tate to Davidson, June 20, 1922. All the Fugitive
correspondence is as yet unpublished; henceforth in this study letters will be
identified by the sender, the recipient, and the date.
* Davidson to Tate, July 2, 1922.
63
64 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
self some time every day for the writing of poetry. As a matter
of fact, both he and Tate found their minds turning constantly to
matters of poetic technique.
One poem of Tate's, " Euthanasia," had already been published
in The Double Dealer, and two more, " Parthenia " and " William
Blake," had been accepted for the July issue. " Euthanasia " had
been accompanied by the brief note: "Allen Tate writes that he
is but twenty-two and lives in Nashville, Tenn., of which two
facts, says Mr. Tate, the latter is perhaps the more damning. He is
a poet with a new tang." 3 The "new tang" of Tate's poetry,
perceptible in such lines as
No more the white refulgent streets,
Never the dry gutters of the mind,
Shall he in hellish boredom walk
Again, for death is not unkind. 4
was apparent, at any rate, to one of the magazine's readers. Hart
Crane had translated three of Laforgue's " Locutions des Pierrots " B
for the same issue, and in looking over the magazine saw and liked
" Euthanasia." He wrote its author, saying that he could see Tate
had read T. S. Eliot. (As a matter of fact, Tate wrote in his recol-
lections, he had not read Eliot; but he soon did. 6 ) Crane's letter
explained his feeling for the French poet he had translated. Some
of his friends had felt, he said, that his enthusiasm for Laforgue
would be more genuine if he knew more about the older French
literature; but he had answered them: ". . . my affection for
Laforgue is none the less genuine for being led to him through
Pound and T. S. Eliot than it would have been through Baude-
laire." 7 Tate had read Baudelaire; and he studied Crane's transla-
'III, No. ii (May, 1922), 262.
4 This poem was later reworked and published as "Elegy: Jefferson Davis."
(See Appendix.)
5 These translations were not reprinted until the appearance of Brom Weber's
study of Crane (Hart Crane, New York: The Bodley Press, 1948).
6 "The Fugitive 1922-1925," loc. dt., 80-81.
7 As quoted in Warren Ramsey, "Crane and Laforgue/' The Sewanee
Review, LVIII, 3 (Summer, 1950), 44142.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 65
tions, together with other poems that Crane sent him in manuscript,
connecting what he saw in them with what he had previously
learned from Baudelaire and Mallarm.
What Crane had considered an " Eliot " tone in " Euthanasia "
Tate was ready to acknowledge. In an attempt to console Davidson
for the rejection of his "Amulet" by The Double Dealer, Tate
wrote: "You know how readily they took 'Euthanasia* and
'Parthenia' and, since I left, even 'William Blake'! All these
poems, with the possible exception of ' Parthenia,' are quite inferior
to your 'Amulet/ but their tone is in unison with Eliot, Pound,
and Company; and so they took them." 8
Along with copies of his own poems, Crane sent Tate back
numbers of The Little Review. 9 Out of the ferment that these new
materials induced in him came such poems as "Non Omnis
Moriar," "Elegy for Eugenesis," "Bored to Choresis," "Lady
Fabulous," " Long Fingers," " To Oenia in Wintertime," and " The
Duchess of Malfi," all making use of a new ironic mask and a new
indirection, wherein a state of mind is suggested, rather than
described, by the images and allusions in the lines. "Elegy for
Eugenesis" illustrates Tate's new style:
Your death, dear Lady, was quite cold
For all the brave tears and ultimate spasm,
So civilized were your thin hands, I marvel
They too, like jellyfishes, came from protoplasm.
O ineffable cheeks of rhododendron bloom,
It cannot be youVe withered so mortally!
Your husband is heartbroken he said so,
Winking at his cocktail, talking dollars carefully.
Dear Lady, it is revealed that you were twenty-six
And died giving us an homunculus with bald head;
May your black hair darken even the dark Styx,
May your soul have no tears, forgetful of protoplasm.
June 20, 1922.
Tate passed these on to Davidson to read, and in them Davidson first read
parts of Ulysses.
66 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
We buried you in the unremissive ground.
I went home. Somewhere I heard the clang of a hearse.
You are very far away, dear Lady
As I light this cigarette and under an inscrutable curse. 10
Tate's study of Crane was close. For instance, when Davidson
was having trouble rhyming the word counter in his poem "Dryad,"
but felt he could not give the word up, Tate urged him to leave the
line unrhymed, referring him to Crane's " Praise for an Urn,"
in the June Dial:
You will notice that Crane uses an unrhymed stanza as the norm,
and breaks it only in the one case of two stanzas in enjambement, and
then he rhymes the first and third line of the first stanza in an appar-
ently casual manner, but really for the purpose of greater rigidity,
knowing that eight unrhymed lines in irregular quick tetrameter won't
hold together alone. I can't use it so freely as Crane, but there is
something of the kind in " Elegy "where, in the third stanza, I break
the norm by rhyming the first and third lines as a surprise, but I pull
it together again by the echo-rhyme " protoplasm," on the first stanza, in
the fourth line. This same general scheme was used in the last
century by the French poets, notably Laforgue, and it is not lacking
in English even in Samson Agonistes. And so I implore you not to
ruin a good poem with a bad rhyme. 11
Davidson gave close attention to Tate's advice. He too was
stimulated by Tate's "discovery" of Eliot, Laforgue, and Crane,
although he wrote that he had purchased a copy of Eliot's poems
and wondered ruefully if his dollar and a quarter were well spent. 12
He was writing poems in which he attempted a new, satiric tone
" Dryad," " Ecclesiasticus " (I and II), " Priapus Younger," " Naiad,"
and " Corymba." Passages from these last two named indicate the
direction in which he was moving:
Nothing could dull that magic whispering,
Imperious on the river's copper slant,
10 "Elegy for Eugenesis," The Fugitive, I, 3 (October, 1922), 92.
"July 12, 1922.
"To Tate, June 17, 1922.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 67
Or hide from her the vague forms flickering
In the haunted depths, darting and vigilant.
Bathers ashore were cultivating a tan,
The fat and the lean were gauded cap-a-pie.
She thought that jerseys were not Arethusean,
And a gartered limb to her was monstrosity. 13
and
Corymba has bound no snood
Upon her yellow hair.
But better so, no doubt,
For the pale youths look elsewhere
At sleek curves and proud glitter
And flesh powdered and bare.
She has gone with a jaded youth
To a sudatorium.
The sweating there is of movement
To a cacophonic drum.
The bodies flex, the arms twine
In rhythmic delirium. 14
But, though Tate enthusiastically applauded these poems, and
though Davidson himself was excited by this burst of creative
energy induced by a reading of the moderns, Davidson's use of the
new techniques remained essentially external. His impulse to
poetry could not be, like Tate's, fundamentally affected by the
Zeitgeist. Tate was eventually to interpret himself and his heritage
in terms of the enveloping intellectual climate of the whole literary
age; Davidson's poetic insight was always to function best within
the intensive realm of a tradition inherited as a human being,
who lives within fixed and certain boundaries. Nevertheless, the
correspondence between the two men this first summer, when both
were experimenting in poetic method, made a rewarding exchange
between two creative minds. They exhibited a fine candor in
criticizing each other's work. "Congratulations on getting 'Wil-
1 " Naiad," An Outland Piper (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1924), 39-
14 "Corymba/'ifei., 32.
68 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
liam Blake* accepted that is, personally and in friendly role I
congratulate, not artistically," Davidson wrote, " for I still cling to
my original mulish idea there." 1B And Tate was frequently quite
specific in his condemnation : " I don't like the second line, fifth
stanza because of the inversion," he wrote about " Ecclesiasticus I."
" You know inversions for the sake of rhyme are my pet aversions
16
In fact, the widening chasm between the artistic convictions of
these two was becoming apparent. Davidson, in holding out for a
more traditional poetry than Tate, could not honestly praise Tate's
indirection or his wilful ambiguity:
Perhaps if you have a fault in any of the poems it is in the direction
of obscurity. ... I can criticize you more, however, for what you don't
do than for what you do. There is not, I believe, enough lyrical beauty
in the two larger poems. Perhaps, while you are holding these objects
up to analysis and to some sarcasm, there ought also to be an element
of pity (Stanley's phrase) which would naturally express itself in beauty
of a regretful, poignant sort rather than in hard, chiselled language.
There should be a little more warmth (Curry's phrase) .... I have
always heard a lot of talk about objectivity in writing, but I have
never been able to conceive how in the world it can exist .... One
must have an attitude toward his object; one must pity or scorn or
accept; one cannot simply analyze. 17
Nor could Davidson sympathize with the kind of modernism, dis-
pensed in The Dial, The Little Review, or Secession, which Tate
was finding so heady. In returning a copy of Secession, Davidson
wrote that he found it to be " hokum, very smart, very sophisticated,
but nevertheless hokum." 18
But he was willing to continue trying the new attitudes and
techniques. Tate had praised " Ecclesiasticus," had said it was al-
most on his own " posted ground." 19 So Davidson tried another in
8 To Tate, June 25, 1922.
6 To Davidson, July 12, 1922.
7 To Tate, July 8, 1922.
To Tate, July 15, 1922.
"To Davidson, July 12, 1922.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 69
the same vein, " Ecclesiasticus II," on which he commented, " To
tell the truth, I think it is easier to write this kind of thing than the
other that I have been dealing in more, and for that reason I am a
little inclined to doubt the artistic sincerity of those who affect this
style, including you and myself both! " - Tate replied that he
felt almost as Davidson did about Secession, " checked only by an
opposite tendency to sympathize with almost anything revolution-
ary, sensible or not, and at the same time to derogate conservatism
of all kinds." S1 But he did not like the second " Ecclesiasticus "
as well as the first. He felt that it was " controversial, polemical;
hence limited, like John's [Ransom's] ' Armageddon/ " the last line
of which he considered to be a veritable '* sermon."
Tatc was certain that the issues involved in poetry were purely
aesthetic, not philosophic or moralistic. " If I write a poem to my
left foot, it would certainly take precedence over some other thing
to man's immortal soul provided I am a poet," he argued. " It's
the man who writes the poem and not the arbitrarily chosen
theme." a2 But Davidson's reply was dogged: " I still say, that,
other things being equal, if one of two poems has a bigger theme
than another that poem is a greater, though maybe not a better,
poem." 23 And about Tate's two "Duchess" poems, Davidson
commented, " These forms are too difficult, too deliberately casual,
to bring artistic pleasure except to a very small group of extremely
sophisticated people . . . .""* He was certain, too, that "free
verse" was impossible: "I could not admit an analogy between
poetry and music, except in the minor matters of rhythm and
tone-color. There is where the Free Verse set went wrong, with
their vague talk of 'cadence.' Their idea of a musical cadence
transferred into a form of language-art pleased me very much until
110 To Tate, July 15, 1922.
ai To Davidson, July 21, 1922.
"
To Tate, July 25, 1922.
14 To Tate, August 13, 1922. There is no record now of a second " Duchess
of Malfi " poem, nor does Tate remember ever having composed more than one
on this subject. But Davidson's letters all through this period mention two.
70 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
I found out how very unsatisfactory it was it simply could not be
done with words as a medium." 25
The basic issues upon which the whole group of Fugitives were
in disagreement reveal themselves in these letters: the problem of
language (may a poet use the one he comes by or must he invent
his own?); of meaning (may he approach his subject directly or
must he take a more circuitous route?); of theme (may he attempt
an affirmative treatment on a large scale or must he merely essay
to handle well a small portion of experience?). But there was a
genuine current of affection and esteem running between these
two men, perhaps a closer relationship than existed between any of
the others. Davidson's traditionalism of a different sort from
Ransom's but operating in conjunction with it acted as a check
upon Tate so that he was never to reach the state of disjunction
in his poetry of other brilliant writers with whom he was later
allied. Conversely, that Davidson received sustenance from Tate
he readily acknowledged. "1 know you are a hard-boiled rascal
on criticism," he wrote, " and I am quite sure that you are better
posted on the particular subject-matter and technique that I have
recently assayed than any others of our Fugitive group. Likewise,
you have given me keener and more helpful criticisms than any-
body that ever read my poems, and your ideas and theories have
wonderfully quickened and leavened my stodgy mind. So I am
greatly indebted to you. You will never find me unappreciative
" 26
For all their large differences, their view of the world was
essentially similar, inherited as it was from a traditional society;
indeed none of the Fugitives (except, perhaps, Merrill Moore)
felt themselves forced into either of the dominant poetic methods
of the day: the one, of presenting the poetic object in terms of
observables with no indication of its inner nature; the other, of
analyzing intricately the mental and emotional processes involved
in confronting the object. Despite their seeming opposition, both
"To Tate, July 25, 1922.
"To Tate, August 23, 1922.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 71
these strategies, in denying universals, deny the poet's ability to
say anything truthful. The Fugitive poets had grown up in a
world where there was no doubt of the universals. They had made
their acquaintance with learning in a university which had as its
ideal the coherence of knowledge into one vast scheme, the nature
of which was ultimately religious. Hence they could never for
long doubt the importance nor the efficacy of the individual's
interpretation of his universe.
The Fugitive meetings went on through the summer; at a July
conclave Bill Elliott had read a poem twelve pages long on the
subject of Mount Everest; 2T and in August there was a meeting
at which Elliott, Frierson, Johnson, and Moore (besides the hosts)
were present, Moore having written twenty poems in one week. 28
By the latter part of August, Davidson was back in Nashville from
Camp Kawasawa. A letter he wrote to Tate at this time describes
in detail a meeting of the circle:
We had a great debate at the Fugitive meeting Saturday night
the old controversy of the Moderns vs. Ancients in which our guest,
a Dr. Lockhart [Lacy Lockert] of Kenyon College, Ohio, declaimed
against modernism, supported mainly by Stanley, and opposed by
Ransom and others. I took little part, for I am hesitant to crystallize my
present vague and nebulous ideas into comments on theories of poetry,
only ranging myself against the Secession bunch, the Dadaists, and the
Dialists (of the extieme type). The debate lasted until past two o'clock,
but left the combatants apparently unexhausted and mutually un-
convinced. I read your DUCHESS poems, with an embarrassed smile, I
must confess, when I came to the passages that floored me. (You had
a poor reader; I really didn't read them well, and felt very repentant.
You would have been disgusted with my reading.) But nevertheless,
they seemed to make a good impression, on the whole. They were
more talked about than CORYMBA. The general opinion, much to my
surprise, seemed to favor the second of your poems as the better one
of the pair all except Sidney and myself, who favored i. But they did
87 Merrill Moore had written of this to Tate (Tate to Davidson, July 21,
1922).
* a Davidson to Tate, August 4, 1922.
72 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
not render any criticisms worth while, either for you or for me on
CORYMBA except the point about the trilobite. I had not then re-
ceived your letter. In fact, though we had a good meeting, the Fugitives
didn't seem to get up much enthusiasm over any poem read. So you
and I are in the same boat there. I fear that we are going to be looked
on as the " enfants terribles," the Tumble Two, in the Fugitive club
now. William Frierson gave a criticism of the poems read at the previ-
ous meeting none of which I was familiar with except Stanley's group
and my own, which I had mailed in. The Fugitives seem to like
ECCLESIASTICUS best among mine. Really, I believe they are a little bit
surprised at me, but they were complimentary on the whole, and think
I have developed, apparently.
Ransom read a two and a half page poem of an extremely philo-
sophic nature, which sounded very good, but which I couldn't really
form an opinion of, as he didn't supply carbons. Steve's " Meditation "
I thought very good, and also Stanley's new venture, which ought to
be a fine poem after some revision. It took well. Bill Elliott read a
very short one about a tumble-bug laying the foundations of the
Egyptian pyramids. It was terse and epigrammatic, and apparently ex-
cellent, though I didn't see a copy of it, either. Mr. Frank's and
Sidney's were both too esoteric for me. I hear, however, that Sidney
has written recently some very good stuff, none of which I have yet
seen. Merrill's two poems were pretty fair, but too hastily done, I
think. He needs to cultivate restraint. The rush of language carries
him away. The Fugitives jumped all over one of his poems particularly.
William Frierson read a sort of prose fantasy on Oxford which we all
liked very much. He also read a paper on certain theories of poetry
which was too much for me to absorb from an oral reading. I am
going to get it and digest it, for he's a man of valuable ideas. I got too
sleepy to be a good listener. Not used to being up so late. And that's
about all I have to report of the Fugitive meeting. There is to be
another Monday night. I hope you'll have a new poem here by then,
so that I can read it. 29
At the next meeting, to which Davidson had referred in his
letter to Tate, Lacy Lockert was again the guest, and the evening
ended in a lineup of the members against him. Lockert, an ad-
" August 23, 1922.
Donald Davidson, about 1927,
at the time of the publication of
The'iallMen.
Robert Pcnn Warren in 1924.
Merrill Moore in the summer of
1923. I Ic went to Germany as a
seaman and was a month late
* entering school in the tall.
The Fugitive group assembled for the Fugitive Reunion, Nashville,
May 4, 1956. Present are, bottom row, Tate, Ransom, Davidson; second
row, Starr, Stevenson, Warien; top row, Elliott, Moore, Jesse Wills,
and Hirsch.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 73
mirer of the group but dead set against modern poetry, attacked the
Fugitives for being "sloppy technicians, obscurantists, and too
modcrnly modern." 30 But, though the poets were united against
so romantic a view as Lockert's, this momentary common front did
little toward eliminating their disagreement among themselves. As
Davidson wrote to Tate: "You, Ransom, Bill Elliott, Moore, and
myself are certainly more or less ranged against Stanley, Stevenson,
Hirsch, and Frank. I think the division is really a good thing." 8l
Actually, however, the divergence was more complicated than
Davidson's remark indicated. Although the ones with whom he
grouped himself were advocates of a " modern " attitude toward
poetry, Tate was alone in his championing of ultramodernism.
And his proselytizing with his friends did not succeed. The post-
script to Davidson's letter indicates the braking action which Ran-
som and Davidson exerted upon Tate's exuberance: "Went to
see Ransom Sunday. He thinks, as I do, that you are doing remark-
able things, he likes about the same poems of yours that I do, and he
also advises against going to extreme lengths in modernism." 32
At the meeting, as a matter of fact, Johnson had read " his idea
of your [Tate's] idea of a poem," which caused a great deal of glee.
Tate, replying, gave warning that he would be in Nashville the
first week of September and threatened the conservatives in the
group particularly Johnson with some of their own methods. 33
In considerably better health, Tate was coming through Nashville
on his way to his home in Ashland. After the September meeting
specified in his letter, he would not be present at a Fugitive session
until the following spring, when he would return to Vanderbilt
to complete his degree.
The fall issue of the magazine, which Ransom had edited, was
printed and in the mails before October i . Ridley Wills, who was
later to become a member, gave the group the names of several
likely prospects for the journal; accordingly, the members sent out
ao Davidson to Tate, August 29, 1922.
gl Ibid.
"
81 To Davidson, August 31, 1922.
74 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
a number of complimentary copies, in the hope that a view of the
magazine itself would convince literary men of its quality.
The third issue of The Fugitive gave evidence of a growing
awareness of itself as a publication, with responsibilities as well as
a few airs to assume. The poets disclosed their real identity, the
pseudonyms being discarded, according to an editoral note, " for a
number of good reasons." A chief one of these can be surmised:
many reviewers had presumed the work to be that of one man-
John Ransom operating under various noms de plume, an idea
which must have been disconcerting to the other writers. Another
explanatory note concerning the puzzling organization of the maga-
zine evidently seemed in order to the editors:
It puts in a single record the latest verses of a number of men who
have for several years been in the habit of assembling to swap poetical
wares and to elaborate the Ars Poetica. These poets acknowledge no
trammels upon the independence of their thought, they are not over-
poweringly academic, they are in tune with the times in the fact that
to a large degree in their poems they are self -convicted experimentalists.
They differ so widely and so cordially from each other on matters
poetical that all were about equally chagrined when two notable critics,
on the evidence of the two previous numbers, construed them as a
single person camouflaging under many pseudonyms. The procedure
of publication is simply to gather up the poems that rank the highest,
by general consent of the group, and take them down to the publisher.
This editorial perhaps made the process look a bit too simple, over-
looking the long hours of toil inherent in the mere mechanics of
publishing a journal, not to mention the lengthy wrangles over
the selection of poems. But the project was young, and spirits were
high; all pitched in enthusiastically on soliciting subscriptions and
performing the various other time-consuming tasks. Davidson and
Stevenson did most of what are usually considered editorial chores:
proofreading and makeup, correspondence, and distribution, though
from the beginning the understanding was that all were editors in
the matter of choice of contents of the journal and of decisions
on policy.
But Ransom had so far written the two introductory editorials.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 75
In this issue he extended his critical remarks into a review of a
book by a person of some note On English Poetry, by Robert
Graves. The review is a defense of traditionalism, one in which
Ransom merely made use of Graves's book in order to pursue an
idea that seems to have been already well thought out. On English
Poetry, Ransom believed, did not touch upon the most absorbing
problem facing poets in America: that of prosody. American poets
could be said to "abhor the thought of changing the considered
phrase that perfectly expresses them in the interest of an irrelevance
called meter." But, Ransom wondered, is meter actually irrelevant?
... it would seem at least likely that the determinate mathematical
regularities of meter which are imposed upon the words have as much
to do with the total effect of a poem as, in a sister art, the determinate
geometrical regularities of outline which are imposed upon the stones
have to do with the total effect of a work of architecture.
But one cannot dogmatize here. The charming personality of
Graves expresses itself without embarrassment in prosodical verse. But
some of the most brilliant of contemporary minds have apparently been
unable to do this. To us even who have every encouragement to be
traditionalists, their work at some points seems so perfected that we
would not wish it to be otherwise, their phrases so final as not to admit
the suggestion of change. In illustration we want nothing better to cite
than the Horatian Epode of Allen Tate's which appears in these pages.
We do not believe that these words could be altered without lowering
the given plane of sophistication, and that would only be to destroy
one beauty on the lean prospect of getting another one.
Tate's poem is indeed one of the most striking in the issue. In
fact, though the summer's work had had its effect on several of
the Fugitives, the most noticeable difference lay in the work of
Tate, who for the first time 84 printed in The Fugitive poems that
he was later to consider worthy of preservation in his first volume
" To Oenia in Wintertime " and " Horatian Epode to the Duchess
of Malfi." These two pieces and his other three in the issue
("Battle of Murfrecsboro," "Elegy for Eugenesis," and "Non
84 If we except his translation from Sappho, " Farewell to Anactoria," which
appeared in the summer issue preceding.
j6 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Omnis Moriar ") display the attitude which may with a few reser-
vations be said to underlie Tate's later poetic method: the relating
of his subject to himself, with the knowledge that the poet cannot
deal with things in themselves, but must indicate always his own
reaction to them. The Self, confronted by the apparent realities
of the past, seeking always to come to an understanding of itself in
relation to them this is the subject of Tate's poetry, leading him
to draw upon all the processes of the mind in his verse. As he
wrote later to Davidson : " Poetry is to me successive instances of
the whole rhythm of thought, and that includes reason, emotion,
extralogical experience, or as I put it a year or so ago, the entire
phantasy of sensation." 35 This method demanded for him an
obscure poetry although his aim was not toward obscurity as an
end, but toward the creation of an intricate texture of imagery
and allusion out of the associations which a sensitive and well-read
mind provided. And, despite their obscurity, the early poems of
Tate's are far from formless.
The other poems in the fall Fugitive arc less avante garde than
Tate's. Davidson's work reveals his current indecision about poetic
expression. " Pot Macabre " and " The Amulet " are in his earlier
vein of myth-making; but " A Dead Romanticist," " Censored," and
"Requiescat" reflect the impact of the new experimental tech-
niques, evidencing themselves in his poetry chiefly in the form
of bitter satire. Of Ransom's poetry, " Boris of Britain," " The
Vagrant," and "Fall of Leaf" mark a further departure into
allegory, an extension of the method of " Necrological," in the
preceding issue. Though clumsy and grotesque, they accomplish
their purpose of giving an oblique insight into life's absurdities
without involving the author as commentator. They create a uni-
verse in which people are caught between two contradictory terms
of human existence, and they depict this universe in a diction
that is at once ironic and tender, pedantic and colloquial. The
other poems in the issue are unremarkable, with perhaps only
William Elliott's two worthy of note, in that they represent his
" July 25, 1925.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 77
first appearance in the magazine. He and Frierson were added to
the masthead in this issue as members in absentia, but Frierson
contributed no poems. Elliott's " Epigrams " and " Roundhead and
Cavalier/' both in free verse, exhibit the terseness and rather too-
easy cleverness which often mark that form.
The local papers were somewhat chary in their reviews of the
third issue. On October 8 the Tennessean ran an interview with
Elliott, which Davidson felt was " as stale as old cheese." 3e The
Banner carried nothing. On October 16 a column in the Tennes-
sean, written by Mary Pepper, a Vanderbilt alumna, contained a
brief review of the magazine, commending particularly Merrill
Moore and finding Ransom's style evident in the works of the
other writers. 37 But The Fugitive was receiving increasing recog-
nition from sources outside Nashville. Alice Hunt Bartlett, writing
an article on American poetry for the London Poetry Review, 39
spoke highly of the magazine; and The Literary Digest, reporting
on her article, ran a picture of the Nashville magazine along with
about ten other national poetry journals. 39 Another literary figure,
Horace Walpole, lunching with the Vanderbilt English faculty as
a guest of the Centennial Club, was impressed with the magazine;
it was a fine piece of work, he said, with "no mediocre poetry
in it." 40
The Fugitives invited two cousins, Ridley and Jesse Wills, to
a session on October 7, and by November invited them to join.
At a meeting about November 20, Jesse read two sonnets which
the members liked exceedingly. The dauntless Ridley, however,
read poems that caused " considerable debate." 41 Ridley was chosen
to be critic at the next meeting and indicated that he was going to
tear into the group.
Ridley Wills was back in Vanderbilt to complete his degree
"To Tate, October 8, 1922.
"October 16, 1922.
11 " What America Is Doing for Poetry/ 1 October, 1922; cited in " The
Rage for Poetry," The Literary Digest, LXXXV (December 2, 1922), 33.
Ibid.
40 Davidson to Tate, December 14, 1922.
41 Davidson to Tate, November 24, 1922.
78 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
after an absence of five years. He had left to enlist in the army
in 1917, joining the Luke Lea regiment along with Bill Elliott and
Bill Frierson, and after the war had done free-lance journalistic
writing in New York and had published one novel, Hoax* 2 which
the reviewers found promising. In his student days Wills had been
an irrepressible journalist and prankster, he and Frierson making
up an indomitable team, involved in all sorts of skirmishes and
practical jokes. Just before the end of school in 1917, Wills, as
one of the editors of The Hustler, had written a column defending
a few freshmen who were about to be expelled from school for
throwing water on a faculty member from an upstairs window. In
his editorial Wills emphasized the difference between such boyish
pranks and really serious matters, such as cheating. Apparently
the authorities did not approve of his defense, and when he left
school to join the army, it was with some relief on both sides.
When he returned, he was as bright and flippant as ever. By
virtue of having published a novel he felt a certain authority in
literary affairs and accepted as his duty the task of enlivening the
intellectual life on the campus.
Ridley *s cousin, Jesse, was five years his junior. A native Nash-
villian, Jesse Wills had come to Vandcrbilt in 1918, entering the
Students' Army Training Corps. He had studied four years of
Latin and had done other similarly rigorous work for his preparatory
education at Wallace University School; but under the new regi-
men at Vanderbilt, he took freshman courses in Spanish, economics,
and " War Issues," as well as the more traditional ones of English,
history, mathematics, and French. English was one of young
Wills's best subjects; he first took up writing verse, however, for a
purely practical reason. During the fall of 1920, when Ransom
announced that he would accept poems as substitutes for themes in
his English 13 class, Wills turned in three sonnets. Ransom was
impressed enough to see to it that Wills kept writing poetry; and
during the next two years Wills found a few more literary oppor-
tunities, chiefly through the Calumet Club, where he made friends
43 New York: George H. Doran and Company, 1922.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 79
with Davidson and Tate. After his graduation, however, he resisted
the urging of Mims and other English department members, de-
ciding not to pursue graduate study in literature but to take up his
responsibilities in his father s firm, the National Life and Accident
Insurance Company. Thus, by the time he had become a member
of the Fugitive circle, attending the late, long-drawn-out meetings,
he was already a young businessman, his neat, quiet appearance
belying his poetic capability.
Plans for a December Visitors' Issue of the magazine began
taking shape soon after the fall term was underway. The group
was fortunate in being offered poetry by three fairly well-known
literary figures: William Alexander Percy, Robert Graves, and
Witter Bynner. Percy was interested in the group chiefly because
of his concern for Southern literature; the Fugitives, he wrote, had
helped put the South " on the map, as far as poetry is concerned." 4S
Bynner had been an early friend and admirer of the group. Graves
contributed chiefly because of his interest in Ransom. At the
Fugitive meeting November 4, the December editorship fell to
Stevenson, his committee to be Johnson and Moore. Ridley Wills
proposed Ransom for permanent editor, but his suggestion was
vetoed. 44
Many of the members were in favor of delegating one of the
group as editor, in order that the business of answering correspon-
dence, mailing out subscription copies, and turning in the material
to the printer might be done more efficiently. The issue had been
late the last two times it had appeared, and editorial matters were
allowed to drag along indefinitely. Poems sent in were kept a long
time some of them disgracefully so before being returned. 45 How-
ever, when they were sent back to their authors, they were usually
48 To Tatc, October n, 1922.
44 Ransom to Tate, November 5, 1922.
48 One man who had sent in a poem and a stamped, addressed envelope in
May, 1922, wrote to the editors twice after having received no word from
them for months. Finally, almost a year later, he sent the poem to American
Legion Weekly, where it was accepted. He became worried then (needlessly)
that The Fugitive might consider that it had a right to the poem.
80 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
accompanied by a letter of seriously considered criticism, most often
written by Davidson or Tate.
But since much of the labor fell upon Davidson, who had to
slight his own affairs to work for The Fugitive, some of the mem-
bers Tate and Johnson particularly favored making him editor.
But others, chiefly Ransom, opposed the move; so the matter was
allowed to rock along, a topic of dissidence at each meeting, but
one never threshed out. All during the fall of 1922 the question
was argued. On November 16 Davidson wrote Tate now working
for his brother's firm, the United Collieries in Ashland and Cin-
cinnatithat the topic was to be taken up at the next Fugitive
meeting: "We are going to make a move for better organization
Saturday night. Wish you were here." But nothing, apparently,
resulted from the discussion, for by December 4 Davidson was still
concerned with the same matter: "This organization question is
almost ready to come to a head now. Something has got to be done,
and something will be done. I think the membership are in a better
mood now for considering the question than they were last month
and before. Perhaps we will wait until Curry arrives to work out
a plan; I don't know, though. I have long been in favor of pushing
things to a conclusion/' 48 The members decided, however, that
henceforward a single person should edit each issue, just as
Stevenson was in charge of the forthcoming December number.
The brethren looked forward to this next issue with a good deal
of excitement, since within its covers they were for the first time
playing host to other literary men.
Tate found himself ill at ease in the world of commerce and,
with his brother, before long realized that he was not cut out to
be a businessman. He planned a trip to New York, and Ransom
wrote him a letter of introduction to Christopher Morley. To
Tate, Ransom commented: " I think you are doing the inevitable
thing in having a fling at New York, though I am skeptical about
any good man's making his way there by literature pure and unde-
filed." 4T He feared that Tate might forget about The Fugitive if he
49 Davidson to Tate, December 4, 1922.
47 November 5 [1922].
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 81
became embroiled in the literary world of New York; and the
group's loss of him would be calamitous, Ransom felt, since Tate
was essential to " the scheme."
But Tatc was not likely to forget The Fugitive. His trip to
New York fell through, and he was forced to remain for a while
in Cincinnati, from which location he sent in a poem and an edi-
torial for the approaching issue of the magazine. Both caused a
considerable stir. Tatc sent the two pieces to Davidson, asking him
to read them at the next meeting. The poem, "Nuptials," a
vignette of life spent in despair in a commercialized society, David-
son considered "real poetry," he wrote Tate. It possessed "the
proper balance between the modern and the traditional the
medium in which you arc destined to do your best work." * 8 Per-
haps, he felt, there might be still in it a little too much "of the
Eliot tinge," and he did wonder if one did not owe it to himself
" to pick more elevated material . . . ."
Davidson showed the poem to Stevenson, who, writing to Tate
before the meetings, praised it highly, even though it did give him
" an immediate impulse to go and bathe." 49 His praise delighted
Tate, as he wrote, " to the point of aphasia " and inspired him to
take eighteen out of the next twenty-four hours for the composition
of another poem (" These Deathy Leaves," which he described as
being " as pure as Mrs. Hemans "). After declaring that it was
" great fun to do the modern stuff," but that the more traditional
patterns offered "a unique satisfaction," he commented, "Of
course this is a dreadful confession for the youthful harbinger of
guts, ovaries, and death to make; but I'm sure you won't give me
away to the Brothers, who would straightway cry, ' I told you so! ' " 50
Tate's editorial, entitled " Whose Ox? " chiefly concerned itself
with the problem that Ransom had touched upon in his review of
Graves's book in the preceding Fugitive: the relation of traditional
form to modern poetry. In the following manner Tate explained to
Stevenson his sending the piece, even though it was unsolicited:
*' November 8, 1922.
49 November 12, 1922.
90 To Stevenson, November 14, 1922.
82 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
You may wonder at my presumption in contributing an editorial.
It came about this way. While I was in Nashville last time, John and
Don suggested that I write about the Procession, and I have done so,
dealing with it in its two main aspectsradical and conservative. I
believe that I have made a point not often emphasized, if indeed it
has been given this particular application at all, and it may be worth
printing. It seems to me that since we shall probably attract more
notice through our visitors than we have got before it might be well
to spread the news that we are at least aware of the large issues, and
that if we ignore the more radical tendencies in the main it is because
we have a defensible reason for doing so. My point is simply that
the two main tendencies have each an equal claim to consideration;
that the difficulty heretofore has lain in a confusion of issues; and that
now, since Eliot has recently achieved the model of the extreme type,
it is the office of criticism to maintain two standards so long as both
genres produce notable things. . . .
Any changes you may suggest I shall be more than glad to know.
I am rather keen to see how the thing strikes Stanley the incorrigible.
I believe he has been converted to Modernism via Conrad Aiken and
sich-like; and so I suppose I shall have to ask you to think of him when
you come to my allusion to the " Side-Show." 51
Stevenson wrote back his appreciation for the essay, and Tate
replied, again referring to his presentiment that " Stanley and his
analytical hounds, nose close to the scent . . ." would not like it,
in spite of the fact that Tate was sure that he had struck "the
beloved golden mean/' 52
Writing before the Fugitive meeting, Davidson called the edi-
torial a " hum-dinger," and said that he, Ransom, and Stevenson
were for it, although Ransom had suggested it might be made " a
little less of a general pronunciamento ... by a change in pro-
nouns [from we to I]." 53
Tate's editorial was an attempt to state more clearly the aesthetic
position of The Fugitive. " We are told," he wrote, " that we evince
a uniformity of outlook, of tone; that we have the earmarks of a
51 Undated letter, sometime early in November, 1922.
"Tate to Stevenson, November 14, 1922.
B3 To Tate, November 16, 1922.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 83
School." But he would qualify the unity of the Fugitives: theirs
was a uniformity with interesting deviations, these divergencies
lying within mechanical problemsversification, diction, composi-
tion. Heretofore, he maintained, it had been generally agreed that
the poet's product must represent a comprehensible part of life;
but the inadequacy of this premise was possible: ". . . perhaps the
world as it is doesn't afford accurate correlatives of all the emotional
complexes and attitudes; and so the artist, or poet, is justified in
not only re-arranging (cf. entire English tradition) but remaking,
remoulding, in a subjective order, the stuff he must necessarily
work with the material world."
This problem of representation, Tate wrote, was central to the
poet, since it determined to a large degree his diction and his
prosody. T. S. Eliot, for instance, had shown "for all time" in
The Waste Land "the necessity, in special cases, of an aberrant
versification." Most of the experimental verse then being written,
Tate agreed, was mediocre; but mediocre poetry was hardly limited
to either unconventional or traditional techniques. "It is a ques-
tion, rather, of Whose Ox": "Perhaps T. S. Eliot has already
pointed the way for this and the next generation. But there are
and will be many still faithful to an older, if not more authentic,
tradition; for the old modes are not yet sapped. However, the
Moderns have arrived, and their claim is by no means specious.
The Fugitive doesn't attempt arbitration; it is humble; besides, it
has other fish to fry. But which tradition can the American honestly
accept? A fair, if stale question." 54
After the meeting, Davidson reported a favorable decision for
the editorial but indecision over the poem, 55 most of the group
having reservations about it because of its sordid subject. Hirsch
had called it a " versification of a Ben Hecht novel." And, although
the editorial was " well-received on the whole," Davidson enumer-
ated a few points on which suggestions had been made for changes
in it. Some thought Tate was perhaps too certain about the
absolute value of Eliot's Waste Land; others thought he had in-
84 " Whose Ox? " First draft, MS.
"To Tate, November 24, 1922.
84 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
correctly made a distinction between artist and poet, meaning
perhaps painter and poet; and a few felt that his editorial we should
be changed to I. But Davidson's comments ended on a tone of
high praise: " I think everybody took it as a brilliant piece of work;
none of us, except John, could write such an editorial." 5e
Tate reacted to this news with his customary impulsiveness,
agitated particularly at separation from the group when the Big
Issue was being produced. (He wrote in his November 27 letter
to Stevenson: "And to think I'm away when the great show is
going on! ") Unable to argue his case at meetings, he felt sure
his principles did not receive a fair treatment from some of the
members. Sending a revised version of the editorial to Stevenson,
he wrote: "I believe that the chief objections to the thing were
based on the fear that the members en masse might be held re-
sponsible for my radical and perfectly terrible views, so I've
changed a few pronouns and made other things clearer. . . . May
I hazard the remark that if some of us weren't so lazy and would
read a little to find out what is going on in the world which we
contemn so lustily, perhaps there would be among us less prostra-
tion before the Idols of the Cave? " 5T But then he added, " Now
please, Steve, laugh at this bile." Stevenson did better. He smiled
sympathetically and undertook to explain.
... I wish gently but firmly to disabuse your mind of certain con-
cepts now seeming lodged there. ... I believe that you will remember,
upon reflection, that the editorial policy of the group, so far as there has
been one, is to make each person responsible for his editorial dictums,
not with any inferiority or fear complexes in mind on the part of the
rest of the editors, but owing simply to non-subscription to views
expressed, or to that genial schismatism to which you allude. Really,
you can hardly dye a man saffron for refusing to take responsibility
for something he doesn't conscientiously agree with . . . , 58
He made secure his argument by pointing out that Tate himself
would not want to subscribe to an editorial written, say, by Hirsch.
M Ibid.
67 November 27, 1922.
" To Tate, December 2, 1922.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 85
Actually, the conservatism which so irked Tate at this time
was one of the merits of the Fugitive association. Different from
a narrow conventionalism, this reluctance to follow new theories
held in check any programmatic approach to poetry, so that one
persuasive person with insight was not allowed to pull the others
over to his point of view. A willingness on the part of each of the
poets to attack the work of others and to defend his own made not
for unscrupulous egotism and backbiting, but for clarification of
ideas and an enforced toleration of dissimilar views. Tate and
Davidson, for instance, were convinced that Hirsch/s " Nebrismus "
was not of sufficient merit for publication in the magazine; never-
theless the committee voted it in. But most often, certainly, what
was castigated within the group was the Eliot-Crane-Pound style.
At the next meeting, early in December, Johnson and Moore
each read a poem; Davidson read two poems by Tate and one of
his own; and one of the other members read two sent in by W. A.
Percy. Then, after Stevenson had read his editorial, Ridley Wills,
in the role of the evening's critic, assailed the group roundly.
Davidson reported on the criticisms:
I le claims there is not enough modulation and shading in Fugitive
poetry, says we all have " anthologies of perfect phrases." Charges also
that we do not often enough conceive poems as wholes and don't
write in a unity of mood .... Well, there was a warm debate, in
which Sidney and I finally locked horns again on old lines, but without
rancor, and in which everybody took interested parts. The evening
wound up with an argument on sophistication conducted with Stanley
as leader. In short we had a gay time, quite in the old spirit. The
Fugitive crowd are on their feet now, I believe. 59
Immediately after the December issue was printed, before the
magazines were delivered to the editors, Davidson sent Tate two
advance copies with his comments. He still had doubts about
" Nebrismus," felt that three of Moore's poems were perhaps too
many, and was not sure the best choice of his own poems had been
made. But, he wrote, " the committee did make some very pleasing
59 To Tate, December 4, 1922.
86 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
variations, as in their selection, for the most part, of shorter poems
in varying moods, thus avoiding the turgidity of some earlier
issues." 60 He considered "Nuptials," Stevenson's "He Who
Loved Beauty," and Bynner's "Leave Some Apples" the best
poems and was pleased with both Tate's and Stevenson's editorials.
Ransom wrote to thank Tate for his dedication of " Nuptials."
" I like the compliment immensely," he commented. He did not,
however, like Moore's poems in the magazine, nor Stevenson's
" Rondeau for Autumn "; and he felt that Johnson's " A Certain
Man " should not have been given the " place of honor." The
" great poem of the number " he considered Percy's " Safe Secrets."
Referring to Ridley Wills's criticism of the group, Ransom ex-
pressed his own idea of the Fugitives' limitations: "I think the
most of us (not often you) are like jeweller's apprentices; we invent
nothing, we hardly see the whole, but we are good at cutting the
individual stones. Our patterns that we make out of all our treas-
ures are either nil or they are perfectly standard: WHAT WE LACK
is ESSENTIALLY ARTISTIC TASTE. Would it be painter's parlance
to say that we can paint but we can't compose? " 01
Ransom's metaphor describing the group of poet-smiths seems
applicable to their array of diverse gems presented in the December
issue. The lack of artistic taste which he mentioned allowed the
inclusion of a few poems dangerously below the Fugitive standard,
ironically enough, one of them the piece Ransom had called the
great poem of the issue. Of the four guests, one other besides
Percy Bynner had contributed a poem of no artistic consequence.
David Morton, the first Vanderbilt graduate to achieve literary
recognition, was represented by a well-constructed sonnet of a
quality roughly equivalent to the work of the less serious Fugitives.
Robert Graves's two poems were something of an asset to the issue,
chiefly because of their witty and flavorful language.
The members' contributions are, for the most part, below their
usual standards. The three-page poem by Hirsch, " Nebrismus,"
60 To Tate, December 17, 1922.
"To Tate, December 17, 1922.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 87
two poems by Ridley Wills, one by Frierson, and two by Johnson
fail to exhibit any artistic merit. One of the seldom-heard members,
Frierson, who never seriously meant to be a poet, had sent in a
dozen-lined tirade against Fugitive poetry; entitled " Reactions on
the October Fugitive," it begins
I am tired of being bitter.
I am weary of the disillusionists,
And of those who tell with uncommon zest
that corpses stink-
As a joke on the Christians.
A comment on the " anti-poetic " trend of the group, this poem
voices the attitude of Elliott and Johnson as well as of its author.
Stevenson's two poems are, like all of his work, technically un-
impeachable. They contain some lines of striking lyric beauty,
such as
When twigs, gray, black and brown through all the glade
Loose their slow-sailing weight of sapless leaves,
and
Dolorous, here he made his stand
Like those who are beaten,
Behind, the mountains, and in front, the sea,
To the west a rock by the brown river eaten.
But Stevenson had not learned to avoid the tight, neat ending
which drives home the "point"; as a result, these poems lack
strength. Merrill Moore's work falls short on quite another count;
his lines arc always strong, but unkempt and neglected, the product
of a somewhat scandalous liaison with the Muse.
Tate, Davidson, and Ransom, however, contributed work that
would have been a credit to any poetry journal. Tate's much-
discussed " Nuptials " appeared, a work of interest in his develop-
ment even if its permanent value is doubtful. The impact of
The Waste Land is strongly evident in both theme and method,
but in " Nuptials " the intense particularization of object and idea
88 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
has not subsided into a completely embodied poem. It is most like
Eliot's " Preludes " a sordid picture of soulless city life, but
without the redeeming beauty of language. And yet " Nuptials " is
not completely out of the line of Tate's work, for in it he makes
his first moral criticism of modern society. His other poem, " These
Deathy Leaves," in which he attempted the traditional mode, is
inconsequential, redeemed only by an occasional Tatian phrase:
" swift white mind's brain," " a quick sculpture of a fresh grace."
Davidson's three poems, like Tate's, show the effect of further
experimentation with the new poetry, but less in fundamental
elements than in texture. Like his verses in the October issue,
these evidence a general tightening of diction, a dropping of
romantic imagery, and a heightening of the sardonic tone:
Thin lips can make a music,
Hateful eyes can see,
Crooked limbs go dancing
To a strange melody.
His poems are, however, still lyrics; and unlike Tate's they retain
numerous traditional elements.
Whereas Tate and Davidson showed the greatest growth in
poetic conception and execution, it was Ransom who contributed
the one really good poem of the issue. " In Process of a Noble
Alliance" is, to make use of Ransom's figure, an exquisitely de-
signed piece of jewelry, far beyond the powers of an apprentice.
If it is form that Ransom conceived to be lacking in Fugitive verses,
this poem, by means of its intensely realized dramatic situation,
refutes its own author:
Reduce this lady unto marble quickly,
Ray her beauty on a glassy plate,
Rhyme her youth as fast as the granite :
Take her where she trembles, and do not wait,
For now in funeral white they lead her
And crown her Queen of the House of No Love.
A dirge then for her beauty, Musicians!
Ye harping the springe that catches the dove.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 89
Ransom's other poem of the issue is a not very successful investiga-
tion of the short-narrative allegory style which he later manipulated
with great skill.
The prose contents of The Fugitive consisted of Tate's editorial,
slightly amended as the other members had suggested, and short
editorial comments by Stevenson: "THE YEARLING FUGITIVE
LOOKS BACK with some pride and not a little amazement upon its
initial twelve months. A genial critic noted our first adventuring,
wandering in the Sahara of the Bozart, while we now with surprise
and glee gloat over many a sudden oasis." Acknowledging response
from Canada, California, London, and Berlin, "as well as from
those who, from reasons of proximity or friendship" might be
expected to lend support, The Fugitive announced its intention of
publishing on a bimonthly schedule.
But the December number of the journal had provoked heated
argument which had remained essentially unresolved, and so the
Fugitives were left with an awareness of ineradicable differences
among themselves concerning aesthetic theory and practice. Tate's
poetry, since it represented the most daringly experimental attitude
in their midst, became the locus around which each member
graphed his own poetic beliefs. Describing a meeting on December
1 6, Ransom reported to Tate: "Your new poems offered last
night under Don's sponsorship created a good deal of comment.
The party lines were drawn about as usual, Whip Johnson and
Whip Ransom polling their full party strengths." 62 But one
"sinner" was saved, he said Stevenson, who at this meeting
stoutly defended the modern point of view. At the gathering,
Hirsch recited four of his poems, and, according to Davidson's
account, Mr. Frank "delivered a criticism which called Plato,
Socrates, Cicero, Webster's Dictionary, and other learned authority
to witness that lofty themes, not simply technique, is what we want
to lay hold of." 63 Davidson read two of his own poems" Twilight
Excursion" and "Essene." Ransom read a poem called "Max."
" Ibid.
Ibid.
90 The Fugitive Group. A Literary History
But it was Tate's poems, read by Davidson, that became the cause
celebre of the evening.
All the members agreed in liking "Mary MacDonald," a
smooth little lyric without much to distinguish it. But " Teeth," a
more daring piece, provoked debate. Except for the first stanza,
Tate later said, this poem was partly a parody of "modernism,"
written to pull the leg of the group,
No music comes to sorrow like a thief,
No twitter of birds, as in Spring, for eucharist:
Only the soft thrust of a falling leaf
And in the mind the bloodless lips of Christ.
You cannot feel the teeth of this pain
Who gloat over the subtle movie queen,
Howbeit your Lalagc cut her throat in vain
When she comes home, seeing what might have been.
(The composite image of spangled death and fear
Does not erase a chiselled arm nor keep
Alas, one's business friend from mixing beer
Inextricably with his concept of female sheep.)
My sorrow is the passing of a look
From bending eyes that stiffened to a stare
As I commented on some vellum book
Or lipped a silver phrase about her hair.
Davidson felt the first and fourth stanzas were " as good as any-
thing . . . [Tate] had done"; the other stanzas seemed to him
weaker. But to Johnson the poem appeared to be unnecessarily
obscure; he considered it " too cryptic " and challenged Tate's trick
of going "from the plane of artistic utterance into byplay and
parentheses." Ransom defended the poem, chiefly on the basis
of its " fine diction." The agreement of the group was finally, as
Ransom wrote Tate: ". . . that while it is admitted that the artist
is subject, during the act of creation, to marginal impressions of
reality and incongruous (seemingly) divergencies, he should not
jot these things down too, but should wait until he has made a
synthesis of his ideas, and should express this synthesis, suppressing
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 91
the extraneous and unaffecting grosser material/' * If this process
were not followed, the poem was likely to be too disjected and
incoherent.
Ransom's December 17 letter to Tate marked the beginning of
a correspondence which, in its exchange of aesthetic theory, was
to be of far-reaching importance to both men. Continuing through
the years with only slight interruptions, it was a less intimate
correspondence than Davidson's and Tate's, less frequent, and less
whole. Indeed, it was quite formal in its colloquial gentlemanli-
ness. But it provided the two with their best opponents for philo-
sophical argument, and, though they were to differ at times heat-
edly, their mutual respect never varied. In this first letter of the
series, the chief topic that concerned Ransom was the " Waste Land
question," which he had argued before with Tate. Ransom found
it difficult, he said, to understand what he took to be a lack of
agreement between Eliot's prose and his poetry. In his critical
writing Eliot had lamented the absence of a form, a condition
which was responsible for the vacuity of the human spirit, the
desiccation of the land. Yet in his poetry, Ransom was convinced,
Eliot was striving for this form but not attaining it: "The reason
he hasn't got it I take to be chiefly because the form has got to
be a philosophy and no less." Ransom went on to give what he
called some "scattering generalities" about a work of art:
The art-thing sounds like the first immediate transcript of reality,
but it isn't; it's a long way from the event. It isn't the raw stuff of
experience . . . the core of experience in the record has been taken
up into the sum total of things and its relations there discovered are
given back in the work of art. That is why the marginal meanings,
the associations, the interlinear element of a poem are all-important.
The most delicate piece of work that a poet has to do is to avoid a
misleading connection in his phrasing. There must not be a trace of
the expository philosophical method, but nevertheless the substance of
the philosophical conclusion must be there for the intelligent reader.
The artist can't stay off this necessitycan't hold aloof, be the impartial
spectator, the colorless medium of information, the carrier of a perfectly
" Ibid.
92 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
undirected passion, the Know-Nothing from Missouri. I can't help
believing more and more (it must be the trace that the classical peda-
gogy has left on me) that the work of art must be perfectly serious,
ripe, rational, mature full of heart, but with enough head to govern
heart.
At this point Ransom asked a question which Tatc was to re-
member and to use against him: " Hasn't it struck you as amazing
that he [T. S. Eliot] shows so much wisdom in his prose while he
favors a poetic vernacular that is utterly irrationalized? "
Eliot's poem, which had appeared in the November Dial,
provided a fresh fervor for Fugitive conversations. The group was
meeting often now, and despite the magazine's precarious lack of
finances, the gatherings were permeated with a sense of power.
As Tate has since written, " All things were possible in that time
to us all, the older and the younger men alike." <>B A gathering was
planned for December 27, when Curry would be in Nasnville
on his way to the Modern Language meeting in Chicago. Although
separated from the group and not contributing any poetry to it
because of his intensive work in the British Museum and the
Bodleian Library, Curry kept up his interest in the Fugitives and
sent them words of encouragement from time to time. Davidson
had mailed him copies of his " Corymba " and " Dryad," and had
received in return a three-page letter of "excellent criticism/' 66
At the coming reunion, Lockcrt and Mims were also to be present;
and the group sent Tate a telegram urging him to come to Nash-
ville for the occasion.
Thus, at the end of the year, the Fugitives could survey their
accomplishments with justifiable pride. They had enlisted the
support of such influential literary figures as Christopher Morley,
Robert Graves, Louis Untermeyer, and Witter Bynner. They could
look back on four issues of respectable, if not uniformly distin-
guished, poetry. The reward of seeing themselves in print was
making most of them consider more seriously the problems of
""The Fugitive 1922-1925," loc. cit., 82.
** Davidson to Tate, October n, 1922.
The Lines Drawn Within the Group 93
poetic art. None of them felt that he had mastered his materials;
but the endurance of the magazine for this first risky period seemed
to promise time in the next few years to experiment and to publish.
As unofficial dean of the group, Ransom had exerted seminal
influence. But, although his own poetry was nearer its mature
style than was that of the others, it was nevertheless many times
inept and awkward. He was in a period of transition from his
rough Poems about God to the classic and disciplined structures
with which most of his present-day readers arc familiar. Of the
fourteen poems he contributed to the 1922 fugitive, however, only
three were not to be used in his next volume of verse, Chills and
Fever: "The Hand-maidens," "Destitution Raiscth Her Voice,"
and " Poets Have Chanted Mortality."
Davidson had contributed sixteen poems to the first four issues,
thirteen of which he was to collect later in his volume An Outland
Piper. The three which have never been reprinted are "The
Dragon Book," "The Valley of the Dragon," and "Teach Me."
Of Tate's fourteen published poems in the first volume, his six in
the first two issues are immature and completely unlike the later
Tate. 67 The other eight poems look toward his seasoned poetry,
but only two of them have been reprinted in his volumes. Tate was
perhaps no further from his mature method than was Davidson; but
the very nature of his talent caused him to sacrifice the complete-
ness of a poem to experiments in technique, whereas Davidson's
products possessed always a roundness that made them finished
poems, even if not completely distinguished ones.
The group took pride in having earned the kind of respectful
attention that Louis Untermeyer's letter to them represented:
" Congratulations on your first year. Your magazine is alert, never
without vitality, always provocative. I disagree with what I imagine
are some fundamental tenets of some of your group, but that dis-
agreement is founded on a respect for your tastes and a hearty
sympathy with your aims." 8 But what gave the Fugitives pleasure
67 Excepting again the translation from Sappho.
" December 8, 1922.
94 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
was more that Untermeyer's praise represented recognition from
the current literary world than that it offered any basic corrobo-
ration of the quality of their poems. For this encouragement, the
Nashville poets were dependent on no outside judgment. They
had their own critical arena in which diverging viewpoints could
be brought to bear upon their poems; and usually they more or less
trusted the general judgment. But some of the individual members
were becoming aware of an even more trustworthy critical standard
their own convictions, which relied, finally, on the praise and
acceptance of no one.
CHAPTER FIVE
IRR1J^
CONTROVERSY-
THE RESULTS OF
COMMITMENT:
1923
THE DISCREPANCY between artistic and finan-
cial success began to be apparent to the Fugitive poets by the time a
few weeks of 1923 had elapsed. Though the magazine had elicited
flattering praise and attention, only eighteen subscriptions and
twenty-seven renewals had come in by January 13 a pitiful $45
against the year's estimated expenses of $400. The strong local
support on which the group had counted was evidently not forth-
coming.
Up to now these men had hoped that their obviously serious
poetry would be welcomed as a step in the direction pointed by the
section's intellectual leaders: toward cultural progress. If there
were a kind of renaissance in the South, as some authorities appar-
ently believed, surely public support of the artist would not be
long in coming. As a matter of fact, however, the Fugitives had
not yet traced the widespread Southern optimism to a mere rise
95
96 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
of industrialism in a heretofore "backward" land; nor had they
seen as inevitable the disparity between the kind of Southern
literature welcomed by the promoters of culture and the kind that
honest Southerners could produce. Finding no sponsorship in
their section, their city, or their university, they were faced with
the problem not only of financing the magazine but also of gaining
their livelihoods. There was no profession of letters in the South.
Once during this period when he sent in a check to The New
Republic in response to a plea made by Babette Deutsch for a
destitute German writer, 1 Tate made a corresponding plea for
young American writers. They were in a situation quite as dis-
couraging, he believed, if not so dramatic. 2 Their choice, too, was
to desert letters or starve.
Among the Fugitives, two who from all appearances were in-
clined by nature to the literary profession Alec Stevenson and
Jesse Wills had already turned their chief efforts to business
careers, a decision that made them henceforward approach writing
as an avocation. Curry, Ransom, and Davidson had accepted the
university's shelter, one for which they were grateful but which
nevertheless forced them to live on a pittance and to spend much
of their lives overwhelmed by academic duties. Johnson, too, was
for the present living by the grace of an academic role, but he was
soon to be lured away from the pursuit of serious literature by the
will o' the wisp of popular literary fame. Tate, more clearsighted
about his aim in letters and less optimistic about the financial sur-
vival of the poet, was yet reluctant to accept the compromise of
teaching, even though a clear-cut choice for literature did not seem
available. For some of the Fugitives, of course, the choice was of
no moment. Merrill Moore was dedicated primarily to medicine;
James Frank, although a man of learning and sensitivity, could not
have been a man of letters; and the elegant Hirsch, a dilettante not
subject to middle-class morality, felt no economic pressure. But
* " Help for a Young German Author/ 1 The New Republic, XXXIII, No.
419 (December 13, 19**), 71.
"Our Struggling Writers" [Letter], The New Republic, XXXIII, No.
423 (January 10, 1923), 177.
ControversyThe Results of Commitment: 1923 97
they were all concerned with the meager yield of poetry in the
fertile land of their homes.
The financial situation of The Fugitive was the chief subject of
discussion at the first meeting in January. Ransom argued strongly
for a reduced size (twenty-four pages instead of the former thirty-
two) against several other members who felt that the next issue
must be an important one, " as much as anything else to make up
for the lapse in the December number/' s But the final agreement
was to try the smaller magazine for one issue and to mail out an
advertising circular to prospective subscribers.
If there was no support for The Fugitive from the general
public, however, there were nods of recognition from other journals.
The Modern Review and The Nomad traded half-page ads with
the Nashville publication, and by January the well-established
Double Dealer agreed to exchange advertising, but on a two-to-one
basis. 4 And with growing frequency various periodicals were men-
tioning the Fugitive writers, both collectively and individually.
The December issue, though not a source of pride to some of the
members, nevertheless afforded the circle a bit of publicity. Percy's
poem was reprinted several times 5 with a mention of The Fugitive:
the New York Times reviewer commented on Percy's and Bynner's
poems, treating them facetiously but at least giving evidence that
the magazine was being read. The New York Post devoted a
paragraph to the magazine:
The Fugitive is edited at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.,
by a group of young professors and students, of whom the best known
are Allan Tate and John Crowe Ransom, who wrote "Poems about
'Davidson to Tate, January 13, 1923.
*The New Orleans magazine, with its circulation of about two thousand,
reached approximately three or four thousand readers, its editor maintained, about
three times as many people as The Fugitive reached. McClure politely explained
the inequality in circulation by reference to The Double Dealer's year and a half
headstart. His magazine exchanged with The Dial on a one-to-four basis, he
pointed out (John McClure to Davidson, January 8, 1923 [misdated 1922]).
5 The Kansas Capital, March 17, 1923; the Atlanta Journal, February u,
1923; the Philadelphia Public Ledger, February 19, 1923; Current Opinion,
LXXIV (March, 1923), 350.
98 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
God " (Holt), of which Mr. Morley and Mr. Benet have written in
praise. This magazine is largely a venture of Vanderbilt University,
but it receives good will contributions from outsiders .... The Fugitive
is much more revolutionary than Voices, and tends toward the bizarre
as the latter toward the beautiful. 6
And in Tennessee at least one journalist gave the group serious
attention. Writing for the Chattanooga News, Caroline Gordon,
who at that time had never met any of the Fugitives, gave the
group more praise than had any other reviewer. Under the head-
ing " U. S. Best Poets Here in Tennessee," she surveyed the
various little magazines then flourishing in the South, according
The Fugitive by far the highest laurels. 7 She had written Ransom
for the full history of The Fugitive, and Ransom mentioned her in
a letter to Tate, in which he wrote that the group was "doing
mighty well."
Have got as much attention in one month as we got all last year
and ought to get it increasingly all this year. Having stuck it out a year
they figure we are about as stable as the average of such sheets, I guess,
and give us a perfunctory attention if nothing better. When I get
copies tomorrow I'll send you one of the Saturday's Chattanooga News
containing a Fugitive story in the magazine supplement. Written by
one Miss Gordon, who has developed quite a fondness for us, and
incidentally is kin to some of my kinfolks in Chattanooga. 8
The indirect relationship with Ransom was not for long Miss
Gordon's only claim to being part of the Fugitive family; she was
to meet Allen Tate in Guthrie, Kentucky, during the summer of
1924 and to marry him in New York a short while later. At the
present, however, her praise of the group was quite objective.
But neither praise nor the business of organizing and paying
for a magazine could long divert the members from their business
of poetry. At the first meeting in January, the troubled finances
were forgotten as soon as Davidson, Frank, and the two Wills boys
6 March 10, 1923.
7 The Chattanooga News, February 10, 1923.
1 February zi, 1923.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 99
read poems. Frank's poem, " Pegasus," caused some consternation
in the group, most of the men recognizing it as conventional and
somewhat trite. It was a long allegory, depicting the winged horse's
descent to earth, where, after being shown at a country fair and
awarded all the prizes, he is mounted by a drunken fool and ridden
off into the skies. Johnson, as might have been expected, liked the
poem; Curry was noncommittal. But when Davidson, following
the group's policy of open criticism, attacked the poem's inversions
and hackneyed diction, John Ransom expressed his approval of
" Pegasus " in forthright terms (to Davidson's amazement) and the
group discussion was forced to rest. 9
When Tate saw a copy of the poem, he was convinced, with
Davidson, that the group could not afford to publish anything
diverging so greatly from Fugitive principles. He wrote Ransom
a vehement letter, and that, combined with Davidson's objection,
persuaded Ransom to agree to the omission of Frank's poem. As he
wrote ruefully to Tate, "You were so much more strenuous in
opposition than we could possibly be in support." 10 Ransom ex-
plained his sponsorship of the poem as coming from the respect in
which he held Frank; and, besides, he wrote, using it would have
been an opportunity for a "friendly overture from Sinister to
Dexter." As he admitted, " It was certainly about a couple of cen-
turies late in coming, but was quaint rather than vicious, and
consistent in its tone of pedantic, and not a bit pretentious . . . ." lx
But, he promised Tate, the committee would henceforth be
more rigorous in its selections. There had been an honest discus-
sion at the meeting, and the matter of editorial choice was threshed
out. It was decided that the committee must operate with a free
rein, without attempting to heed any principle of representation.
In a tone which he himself described as sounding a little like " an
elder brother," Ransom went on to say that it behooved them (the
more serious literary members) to be generous: "we are a group,
and presumably committed to individual sacrifices. Least of all
9 Davidson to Tate, January 13, 1923.
10 Undated [early in February, 1923].
11 Ibid.
ioo The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
would it become you or me, we two, to weep and rage. There is
as you know a wide disapproval of our stuffs, and yet we have
been most handsomely awarded with space." Tate answered " peni-
tently sans asceticism," stating that he had " lost his balance " in
the crisis, 12 a charge to which Ransom graciously pled guilty also.
For the next meeting Davidson had prepared and the group
approved a schedule of publication for six issues during the year,
the forthcoming one designated the February-March number.
Stanley Johnson had been selected to perform the editorial tasks
for the issue, and the members were submitting their poems to
him. Merrill Moore, having been reprimanded rather severely by
several of the group, submitted nothing; nor did Hirsch, who said
he had been given so much space in the last issue that he would
take none this time. 13 Stevenson turned in two poems he had
written some time back, but they were not accepted. Tate, ma-
rooned in Ashland, Ohio, which he called " this abdominal little
town," was discontented and working feverishly. 14 He sent in
poems and versions of poems as quickly as he could compose them.
On one occasion, he sat up until five o'clock in the morning com-
posing a third version of a poem entitled " Yellow River," which
he sent in to be read to the group, explaining to Davidson that in it
the symbolism was " detached, and suggestive (I hope) rather than
allusive. Of course that classes me with the ' moderns/ " And he
continued:
If Dr. Mims should see the poem, I should like for him to know
that it is a poem about the South first of all her past and present, with
no prophecy as to the future. I hope my personal failure to voice a
song of hope will not be mistaken for a negation of the positive turn
the Southern mind has been taking in the past few years. The pes-
simism is individual, not general .... Please write me a heartless criti-
cism of this poem, and if you get a chance, ask Doc Curry to read, and
tell me what he says. I am sending copies to John and to Jesse. 15
"As quoted, Ransom to Tate, February u [1923].
"Davidson to Tate, January 23, 1923.
14 To Davidson, January 14, 1923.
15 Ibid.
ControversyThe Results of Commitment: 1923 101
Davidson praised the poem, and when he read it to the group at
the next meeting, found his admiration shared, particularly by
Curry. lfl Ransom, however, although he liked Tate's language,
could not approve his method. He wrote:
You are hitting a great stride these days. I return Yellow River with
pensive annotations. Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian but
I am a tough heathen. Still I am unable to see the art-thing in the
heterogcny. I require for the satisfaction of my peculiar complex some-
thing more coherent than is offered in the mere cross-section of a brain
at a given instant. You are attempting an art of the sub-rational. To me
that seems as unnecessary and as limiting as is the American formula
for the short-story. Everything in dramatic situation, no comments, no
author's personality. We know what that produces. Or pure Imagism,
in poetry. Isn't it an assumption that the poetic is antithetic to the
rational? 17
Tate was not convinced; but " Yellow River " was not published in
its present version, at any rate.
All during this period Ransom and Tate exchanged poems for
criticism; and, although their specific remarks about each other's
work were somewhat invalidated by the fact that they held such
widely diverging critical theories, nevertheless the two men were
immensely useful to one another as keen and respected opponents.
Between Davidson and Tate, on the other hand, there was a closer
friendship and a curious bond of loyalty which predisposed them to
look on each other's writing with sympathy, if not approval. But
Davidson and Ransom united in protesting Tate's extreme experi-
mcntalism, just as Tate and Ransom joined in castigating David-
son's " romanticism." Each of these three was developing his own
conviction almost as much in opposition to as in conjunction with
his friends' attempts to persuade.
Concerning the romantic qualities of his poetry, Davidson
replied once to Tate: " I agree with you and John in a general way
as to my poems. Still I doubt the greatness of ironic lyricism, as you
l " Davidson to Tate, February i, 1923.
17 To Tate, undated [early in February, 1923].
102 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
call it. ... Poetry is surely something broader than a rather sar-
donic, half-beautiful laugh." 18 This was a view Davidson stub-
bornly refused to relinquish. He was to give up the supernatural
and allegorical vehicles for his work, the last of his poems making
use of these already turned in for the next Fugitive, and he was to
experiment somewhat with the Ransomian irony, but always he
would be more serious in his wryness, more biting in his satire than
his friend who could balance with precision a dualistic world. In
fact, Davidson was unable to consider himself a detached observer
of society, isolated from it and in a sense alien to it; for this reason
the devices of other modern poets were for him unusable.
The summer issue of The Fugitive would contain " The Swing-
ing Bridge," the first appearance of Davidson's authentic style a
plain, essentially unwitty idiom, shorn of the conscious modernisms
he had attempted in "Corymba," "Naiad," and the poems pub-
lished in the early issues of the year.
Not arching up, as some good bridges do,
Nor glum and straight, like common iron things,
But marvelously adroop between two trees,
Trembling at slightest touch of foot, it swings,
A span of sudden gloom and cool and a creek's vagaries.
One of Davidson's chief themes is the thinness of the present com-
pared to the fullness of the past, and implicit in it is the cry to
recapture not the past but its plenitude. Part of that plenitude
was song, and in his own poetry Davidson attempted to recapture
some of the union of words with music which occurred as simul-
taneous creations in folk poetry. His " Old Harp " in the October
issue would sound that chord:
Only the mute cool rust
Fingers thee, loosely strung.
And men read as read they must
What once was sung.
It would be much later that Davidson would understand his
18 February 9, 1923.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 103
traditionalism; at the time he was not sufficiently sure of his argu-
ment, but only of his insight and conviction. And Tate and Ran-
som had always been better theorists and better talkers, able more
readily to translate their intuitions into discursive reasoning. So
there was nothing for Davidson to do but to continue attempting
the kind of writing he felt he must, tempering it by the advice of
his two respected friends. And friends these three remained, for
all their differences and sometimes their sense of injury. It was to
each other that they looked for support in the Fugitive circle, and
the other members were never able to wedge between them.
On February 5 the printer delivered the fifth issue of The
Fugitive, a thirty-two-page magazine. (After consultation with the
printer, the group had found that the twenty-four-page size would
be no less expensive.) A number of notable guests contributed
to this issue. L. A. G. Strong and John Gould Fletcher had been
approached by William Elliott at Oxford and both sent in poems
in the spirit of helpfulness, Fletcher in particular feeling a sym-
pathy for the group, made up as it was of fellow Southerners at-
tempting serious verse. Witter Bynner was again represented in
the magazine, this time with a translation of Charles Vildrac's
" The Great White Bird "; and Louis Untermeyer contributed a
poem dedicated to E. A. Robinson and written in the Robinson
style. One other guest, Hermann Ford Martin, was a young doctor
in Lexington, Tennessee, who had responded appreciatively to
criticism Davidson and Tate had written to him on previous sub-
missions. The Fugitives' own verse overshadowed their visitors,
however, Ransom in particular publishing noticeably superior work,
with Davidson, Tate, and Jesse Wills not far behind.
Johnson's editorial, which Davidson called "a regular solar
plexus of one paragraph," 19 made clear its author's lack of sym-
pathy with the growing tendency among modern poets to associate
" Spinoza and the smell of cooking ":
Now that modern poets have pointed out from time to time that there
is no God, that pessimism is the end of knowledge, that the world is
19 To Tate, January 23, 1923.
104 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
so hopelessly pluralistic that one is aware of itchings of the body and
of alimentary sensations the while he endeavors to synthesize beauty,
that sentiment is the naive reaction of morons to external stimulus, that
truth in the relation of the sexes is lechery, that garbage heaps and
dunghills are subject matter of poetryand many other startling and, to
them, seeming highly original discoveries is it not time for one who
is neither poet nor modern to suggest again that these young poets
have prepared for themselves a freedom which looks tragically like
slavery, a courage which smacks of cowardice, and in their creedless
night have committed themselves to a creed of spiritual anarchy?
Johnson ended his comment with a poem stating his preference
for the song of the bird rather than for the garbage-heap or the
dunghill which might be in the same scene with the bird. As
Davidson commented to Tate: " It's all very racy and rather
violent, perhaps partly intended to set forth the other side of what
you propounded last time. It's cleverly written and will please
many of our readers. Though I, of course, like you, will not con-
sent to all or most of Stanley's remarks, I think this divergency of
expression in the Fugitive is a healthy sign and one that will
intrigue our readers, if not the critics, for whom you, my boy,
have a keen ear." 20
Johnson continued in his assumption of the part of minority
opposition. Inherently more iconoclastic than cither Ransom or
Tate, he was certain nevertheless that negative elements had no
place in poetry. This argument continued at the next meeting, on
February 10, when Ransom's poem "Agitato ma non troppo" was
the occasion of " bitter words." 2l Johnson attacked the poem, on
the grounds of its insincerity, and Ransom's defenders embarrassed
him by taking the poem whose tenet is " I have a grief "as
literally true. To Tate Ransom confided, "Really it's a pretty
barren thing of course; nothing at all by itself, and intended almost
entirely to get its significance from its context when placed in a
volume of dispassionate minors if I may so describe my volume
a statement of literary faith. The boys however agreed in taking it
* U>id.
11 Ransom to Tate, February 11, 1923.
John Crowe Ransom, about
the time of the expiration of
The Fugitive.
Allen Tate in the ig^o's,
The five chief Fugitives at the time of the Fugitive Reunion, Nashville,
May 4, 1956. From left to right are Tate, Moore, Warren, Ransom,
and Davidson.
ControversyThe Results of Commitment: 1923 105
as the gospel truth story of a great sorrow about which I chose not to
be communicative." 22
Johnson's argument, which he had prepared beforehand and
read, was an effort to prove that "a poem should be a story."
Ransom's comment was that Johnson's thesis "was worked out
damnably well and of course was absolute moonshine." The dis-
cussion which followed was heated and enjoyable, ending with
Johnson retracting a great deal of his argument. But if Ransom
was able to defeat Johnson on logical grounds, he was never able to
convince him on aesthetic ones; and so Johnson remained in his
relation to the Fugitives a dissenting voice honest, blunt, and
basically at odds with the dominant aims of the magazine.
By February of this second year, the editors of the magazine
could maintain, in a letter soliciting the support of the Nashville
Associated Retailers, that The Fugitive had attracted " more atten-
tion to Nashville than any other artistic undertaking, with the
exception of the restoring of the Parthenon, in the past ten years." 28
The support asked for was the offering of a hundred-dollar prize
for the best poem submitted to The Fugitive in 1923. The mer-
chants granted the request partly of course because their president
was James Frank and their secretary Miss Sadie Hartman, a good
friend of Davidson and other Fugitives. Emboldened by this suc-
cess, the Fugitives convinced Dr. J. D. Blanton, the courtly presi-
dent of Ward-Belmont College, that his school should contribute a
second prize of fifty dollars.
Taking their idea from such magazines as The Dial, The Lyric,
The Nation, Contemporary Verse, and American Poetry, which
had all offered prizes during 1922, the Fugitives planned the
contest as a way of opening the pages of the magazine to outside
contributors. The editors were to select possible winning entries,
these to be printed in the magazine and afterwards submitted for
final decisions to a committee of poets and critics. The group chose
as judges Louis Untcrmeyer, Witter Bynner, and Christopher
" Md.
"The Fugitives to Sadie Hartman, February 8, 192.3-
106 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Morley, but it developed that these three were unable to serve.
They were replaced by Jessie B. Rittenhouse, William Alexander
Percy, and Gorham B. Munson (this last, Allen Tate's selection).
The Fugitives made plans to announce the contest in the April-
May number and to publicize it in magazines and newspapers
throughout the country.
When Tate returned to Vanderbilt in March to complete re-
quirements for the degree his illness prevented him from receiving
in 1922, it was not without some braggadoccio that he took his seat
in the university classrooms. He has written of himself during this
period:
My conceit must have been intolerable. Had not the editors of
The Double Dealer written me a letter saying that they saw in me the
White Hope of the South? Add to that the easy lesson in shocking
the bourgeoisie that I had learned from reading French poets, and was
relearning for American use from Ezra Pound, and you have before you
the figure of a twenty-two-year-old prig as disagreeable as you could
possibly conjure up, until you see in him several varieties of snobbish-
ness, when he becomes even more disagreeable. In that moral condition
I returned to Vanderbilt to get my degree. 24
Tate's " conceit " was never lacking in humor, however; his friends
found him delightful company, and as for his enemies the knife
swing that severs the head cleanly from the body can hardly be
called " disagreeable."
Soon after Tate came back to Vanderbilt he met sixteen-year-
old " Red " Warren, a sophomore who was later to be one of the
most famous members of the Fugitive group. Tate has recorded
his first sight of Warren. It was in the spring of 1923. The young
man wandered into Curry's room, where Tate was typing a poem.
Since students were always coming to borrow Curry's books or his
typewriter Tate at first took no notice. A glance, however, told him
that this one was " the most remarkable looking boy " he had ever
" laid eyes on."
He was tall and thin, and when he walked across the room he
24 "TJie Fugitive 1922-1925," loc. cit., 81.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 107
made a sliding shuffle, as if his bones didn't belong to one another. He
had a long quivering nose, large brown eyes, and a long chin all
topped by curly red hair. He spoke in a soft whisper, asking to see
my poem; then he showed me one of his own it was about Hell, and
I remember this line:
Where lightly bloom the purple lilies ....
He said that he was sixteen years old and a sophomore. This remarkable
young man was " Red," Robert Pcnn Warren, the most gifted person
I have ever known. 25
Warren had come to Vanderbilt intending to major in chemistry, 26
but had found that subject so dull because of the way it was
taught that he rapidly lost interest in it. The chief excitement on
the campus was literary, and consequently he soon took up that
enthusiasm. After his first term of Freshman English under Ran-
som, he was invited to come into the " English 9 " class in advanced
composition, a course that Ransom had been teaching at Vanderbilt
since his return from the war. Warren found Ransom a superb
teacher, extremely stimulating in a quiet way.
In the fall of his sophomore year 1922 Warren was placed
in Davidson's sophomore survey class. Davidson saw that the boy
was unusual not only brilliant but surprisingly well-read. He
allowed him, consequently, to write poems instead of papers for
the course imitations of Chaucer and Beowulf, the first poems
Warren had done in college. Once started, however, he kept
writing, showing his work to Ransom and Davidson, as well as to
Curry, under whose tutelage Warren studied English literature
for the second and third quarters of his sophomore year. Curry criti-
cized his work, lent him books, and discussed with him his literary
heritage. On the epoch-making publication of The Waste Land,
Warren had the advantage of being shown the poem immediately
" Ibid.
16 Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, April 24, 1905, the
eldest child of a businessman and a schoolteacher. He had attended the
Guthrie public school until he was fifteen and then had gone to the Clarksville
High School in Tennessee for a year.
io8 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
(Davidson brought him the issue of The Dial in which it ap-
peared) and of discussing its revolutionary aspects with the three
young professors of literature under whom he had studied. No less
than other alert students all over the country, Warren picked up
in it the indication of a new era of poetry.
It was later on in the same school year that this strangely
gifted, nervous, shy young man encountered Tate in Curry's room
and, soon after, showed Tate his poems. Delighted with Warren's
work, Tate made sure that The Fugitive and The Double Dealer
were acquainted with it, and before long Warren published a poem
in each of these journals. Tate and Ridley Wills began taking
Warren with them to Fugitive meetings, though not until a year
later in the spring of his junior year was he made a member of
the group.
Tate and Ridley Wills knew each other as Fugitives, but it was
through Warren that they became close friends. Wills was, accord-
ing to Tate's description of him, " small, graceful, ebullient, and
arrogant, and one of the wittiest and most amusing companions " he
ever had. 27 This unconventional trio decided to room together in
Wesley Hall, a building for theological students, which, as Tate
admits, was " no place for the heathen." It was a wild and boister-
ous time for all three, when they were intellectually snobbish, no
doubt full of pretense aijd pose, yet withal intensely vulnerable to
poetry and, for all their sophistication, innocent of the ways of the
world. Their room was the scene for horseplay and for serious talk
about art. Tate has described this exciting period in their lives:
In order to get into bed at night we had to shovel the books,
trousers, shoes, hats, and fruit jars onto the floor, and in the morning,
to make walking-space, we heaped it all back upon the beds. We stuck
pins into Red while he slept to make him wake up and tell us his
dreams. Red had made some good black-and-white drawings in the
Bcardslcy style. One day he applied art gum to the dingy plaster and
when we came back we saw four murals, all scenes from The Waste
Land. I remember particularly the rat creeping softly through the vege-
""TJie Fugitive 1922-1925," loc. cit., 82.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 109
tation, and the typist putting a record on the gramophone. Then one
night in the spring Ridley and I went down to " the " dog-wagon and
wrote by dawn the entire Golden Mean. When we showed the manu-
script to Merrill Moore the next day, Merrill was pretty envious; so
we told him that he could be in the book if he wrote eulogies of us;
which he did. But his tongue was not where it should have been. 28
The Golden Mean 29 (which was dedicated to The Fugitive)
was a tour de force and a joke. It was a joke executed with a rather
high level of artistic consciousness, however, for parody and bur-
lesque, if they are to be effective, require talent, as well as some
notion of the principal issues involved. This little prank done by
two youths intending to shock their less daring acquaintances
reveals lively intelligences, sharp wit, and a sense of verbal nuance.
The scheme of the venture was for the poems to achieve a
balance between modernism and traditionalism and so to strike
facetiously the "Golden Mean" (a favorite doctrine of Mims).
Tate was to employ the experimental techniques in scansion,
rhyme, and typographical devices, and Wills was to make use of
the conventional methods. After an introduction by Moore and the
three poems allotted to him (one to R. W., one to A. T., and
the third, entitled " Panegyric to the Entity/' to R. W. and A. T.),
there follow eleven pairs of poems, each pair written on the same
subject, usually with the same title, the first of the two written
each time by Wills and dedicated to Tate, and the second written
by Tate and dedicated to Wills. In one pair " The Waste Land "
is burlesqued as "The Chaste Land," its two versions paralleling
die original closely in the interlarding of quotations from other
works, in erudite footnotes explaining several lines, and in actual
imitations of passages from the Eliot poem. Tate's version ends,
" Shanty, Shanty, Shanty," which he explains in a footnote: "Pra-
krit slang for the peace that surpasseth the pursuit of further
ambition, i. e., the home."
Ibid.
89 The Golden Mean and Other Poems, Limited Edition, privately printed
for the authors [1923].
no The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
The dedication of the volume to The Fugitive was not an idle
gesture. Mimicked unmercifully in the frolicsome pamphlet are
many Fugitive traits most noticeably a penchant for long, pedantic,
little-known words. The lines of both Tate and Wills are filled
with such words as uniquitous, nepenthal, coluthic, punctiform,
myxomycetes, stramonium. Further, the mystic tendencies of
Hirsch are mocked in the two poems entitled " Oum," the footnote
to Wills's poem reading as follows:
OUM (cf. OVM, OM), the sacred word of the Hindoos, is widely
supposed to have originated in a combination of the initials of the
three gods representing the Brahma Trinity. We hesitate to advance a
new theory of the genesis of OM, but it docs seem perfectly obvious
that it is simply a mystical inversion of the word denoting die sound
emitted by cows in moments of ecstacy, viz., MOO. This thesis may
be supported by allusion to religious practice, immemorially antique,
which attributed divine powers to the bull, an animal denominated in
this age of decadence as the cow's husband. However, another theory
may be sustained with equal cogency, that of a feline origin of the word
(cf. Me-ow); and so the Authors, everywhere striving for the Golden
Mean, propose this alternative view. The reader may take his choice.
After mutual tributes, The Golden Mean comes to an end, Wills
having characterized Tate as " a bright and snickering figure on a
fictitious horizon of bathetic intimacy with the rugged outline of
Parnassus," and Tate having described Wills as " the most parabolic
young man of the Younger Generation."
It was all great fun, and not much damage was done. But
meanwhile, as Tate has recorded, this irrepressible trio was also
attending the serious Fugitive meetings" too serious we thought,
hence the dedicatory pages of The Golden Mean and we, the
young ones, were trying all kinds of poetry, from Miss Millay to
Eliot, from Robinson to Cummings who had just appeared." 30
But the April-May issue of the magazine showed no very great
imprint of the younger members' experimentation. Tate was the
only one of them receiving space, and he was represented by poems
""The Fugitive 1922-192,5," loc. cit., 82.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 1 1 1
that unsuccessfully attempt to conform: "The Happy Poet Re-
members Death " and " You Left/' The latter nevertheless contains
a few lines of startling force: "Absence will cleave your portrait
in my mind " and " And yet perhaps the inner eye, unsplintered /
By a blast of beauty from a present ill "; but the whole poem is
inconclusive. The only other pieces of distinction in the issue are
Ransom's much-debated " Agitato ma non troppo," a neat and pun-
gent declaration of his aesthetic attitude; Davidson's "The Man
Who Would Not Die/' a long legend-like poem in blank verse;
and Jesse Wills's " To Jones," a sonnet which, like the one in the
preceding issue, views the present commercial age with blended
scorn and compassion. Frank, Hirsch, and Elliott, against whom
the other Fugitives were so frequently united, found a place in
the issue for their lines. None of the outsiders added any freshness
or individuality to the magazine, which must be rated as one of the
most conventional numbers of The Fugitive.
The editorial called attention to the forthcoming contest, to
the fact that The Fugitive was not connected with Vanderbilt
University, and to the group editorship of the magazine, this last
item emphasized conspicuously:
The Fugitives are a band of anointed spirits associated together on
principles not of race, color, conditions of servitude, nor academic
entitlements. It is constitutional in our plan that we are all equals.
We have no differentiation of ranks or titles, and even cling to an
old-fashioned, round-about method of group-action in doing the chores
of publication, with the very idea of securing the blessings of an
individual liberty against the possible suspicion of a tyranny.
The Fugitives had not yet recognized that actual equality among
poets, as among all men, is a goal impossible of achievement that
charity, not equality, forms the only basis on which men can act.
Unconsciously, of course, the group functioned as a brotherhood,
with each man performing in the way he was most valuable; but
some of the members, holding in theory to the principle of absolute
equality, chafed at the unaccounted-for inequalities and, at times,
experienced a deepseated sense of injustice.
H2 The Fugitive Group A Literary History
The summer Fugitive meetings took on a different character
with two of the regular members besides Curry absent and the
two peregrinating ones Elliott and Frierson back home. This
year Davidson took his family to his wife's home in Oberlin, Ohio;
Ransom made a trip West, to teach in Greeley, Colorado. Tate
remained in Nashville, attending Peabody and trying to pass mathe-
matics. Johnson, too, stayed in Nashville, studying and writing and
sometimes going swimming with Tate, now living in Curry's room.
Tate took over the job of managing editor of The Fugitive and
spent his afternoons answering the magazine's correspondence.
" We are coming along nicely," he wrote Davidson; " the issue is
now mailed out; and we are receiving almost every day a subscrip-
tion or two which I enter apace with a great demonstration of
efficiency." 81 Of his industry, Jesse Wills commented to Davidson,
" I never saw anyone who enjoyed writing letters as he does. . . .
He's carrying on a personal correspondence with several of our
contestants of both genders." 32
The issue that Tate and his helpers had mailed out contained
the qualifying poems chosen by the editors for the first heat of
the contest. Except for Warren's " Crusade," however, the entries
lack energy and interest. Warren's poem possesses a degree of
intellectual power and cogency not often encountered in a novice,
even though it is flawed by an excessive obviousness. Of the mem-
bers' poems in the issue, Ransom's are most interesting, exhibiting
a growing pungency of intellect and diction. His concern for pro-
sodical problems, however, gives his verse a peculiar though not
unattractive awkwardness. One of the poems, " Spectral Lovers,"
makes use of Ransom's favorite theme the danger of yielding to
the allurements of the mind; like his later " The Equilibrists " this
poem portrays two lovers who find themselves unable to allow
physical expression of their love they arc " two immaculate angels
fallen on earth."
Tate's contributions, "The Screen" and "Procession," both
"June 16, 1923.
" July 2,4, 1923.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 1 13
possess imaginative power and suggestion. The first, a reworking of
"Yellow River," is a poem of reflection which attempts, in the
midst of the chaos of present experience, to assess the way in which
the mind can know the past. " Procession," unlike most of Tate's
poetry at this period, is a complete and integrated poem, without
the structural incoherence produced by an imperfectly controlled
metaphorical power. Beginning,
Along the street with deliberate pomp
March the stiff sutlers of an ancient Lord
And have marched since the falling of the first leaf
That withered in the hand of Hildegarde,
Crushing with iron the silly meadow-sweet
After an old man's bones pass down the street,
the poem attains its full expression with a calm directness.
Of the other members, Moore contributed four sonnets that
display indubitable poetic energy but an insufficient intellectual
restraint; Ridley Wills supplied two poems that are his most serious
ever to be printed in The Fugitive: " Once on a Grey Beach " and
" Two Men." Both suffer, however, from a lack of rhythmic and
verbal tension. The first begins:
Once I lay on a grey, soft beach,
And a diffident moon, pale in the fair, late-day sky,
Saw me; and a mindful being of high, aged water
Can swear that I lay on a grey, soft beach,
Unclad, sprawled like a tired laborer rich
with a moment for drowsiness.
This passage and other lines in the two pieces contain some interest-
ing phrasings, but the poems as a whole are facile and unconsidered.
Further, the magazine contained a good sonnet by Stevenson,
two poems by Johnson in his blunt and vigorous fashion, and a
brief but excellent little piece by Curry:
He could not synchronize old shadowed pain,
(Which moves detached along an under cave)
With the present pulse, which sweeps in junketings
To climaxes previsioning a grave.
ii4 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
But trefoils spring where fair Iseult
Once passed through love to martyrdom.
The flash of muscled arms in Babylon,
The porting ships of kings at Avalon,
Receding mountains of Icelandic gloom,
And dangered paths of queens in Ascalon,
Penumbral, tint the whitest flower
That tangles with the instant hour.
This is a verse much seasoned by a mature intellect and an austere
but acute sensibility. It is not difficult to discern, from a reading of
Curry's infrequent offerings in The Fugitive, why the serious poets
in the group looked to him for comment and deplored his modest
estimate of his own poetic abilities.
This summer issue was better than its predecessor. In its
pages was no really bad poem by a member; however flawed and
incomplete some of the individual pieces may have been, it was
evident that the intellects informing the poetry were not incon-
siderable. The issue should have brought the group serious critical
attention. Ignominiously enough, however, die only evidence that
it had attracted notice was a letter from an assistant editor of
Poetry, protesting a comment in the Fugitive editorial. The com-
ment in question had concerned Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry,
reproving her for a lack of critical judgment she had recently dis-
played. In a review of DuBose Heyward's and Hervey Allen's
Carolina Chansons, Miss Monroe had spoken of the opportunity
for poetry in the South, declaring that it was time for Southern
poets to " accept the challenge of a region so specialized in beauty,
so rich in racial tang and prejudice, so jewel-weighted with a
heroic past." She had gone on to say that those who read Carolina
Chansons would find that the " soft, silken reminiscent life of the
Old South . . . [was] becoming articulate/' 33
Perhaps the Fugitives would have taken no exception to these
rather saccharine lines had Miss Monroe not earlier expressed
herself at greater length on the " local color " method. In April,
""The Old South/ 1 Poetry, XXII, No. 2 (May, 1923), 91.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 115
1922, the same month The Fugitive first appeared, the issue of
Poetry, called a " Southern Number," had been turned over to the
South Carolina Poetry Society, with Heyward and Allen (who
was not a native Southerner, but living in Charleston and writing
about it) singled out for especial commendation.
In the first place, the Fugitives resented the concept " Southern
poetry." Poetry was poetry, south or north of the Mason-Dixon
Line, and could not derive its raison d'&tre from any qualities not
literary and universal. In the second place, if the South were to
be depicted in literature, it must be by something more than super-
ficialities, by the essences and not the accidents, as Tate later put
it. 34 But Miss Monroe's editorial in the " Southern Number " was
outspoken in favor of what she called a " strongly localized indige-
nous art," 35 and her emphasis was placed on a mere awareness of
locality, rather than upon any profound critical examination or
creative interpretation of its values. The Fugitives could overlook
her false emphasis in 1922; but by May, 1923, they were more
secure in their standards and so were ready to disagree when she
voiced the same theory in her review of Carolina Chansons. And
though their relations with the South Carolina Poetry Society had
been cordial (Ransom and Davidson had respected the group
enough to submit poems for its yearly contest the preceding April),
Tate, Davidson, and Johnson felt the time had come to protest
that Southern poets need not write consciously Southern poetry.
For Tate, to whom the literary man's task was partly polemical, 36
the necessity of an attack seemed self-evident; for the others, little
argument was required to persuade them to take issue in print
with a personage who, as one writer of this period commented,
fancied herself the editor not only of Poetry but of poetry. 37
84 To Davidson, March i, 1927.
85 Poetry, XX, No. i (April, 1922), 31.
89 In an unpublished letter to Hill Turner, Vanderbilt Alumni Secretary
(March 3, 1941), Tate explained that as a "literary polemicist" he deliberately
adopted a truculent manner in controversy.
87 Theodore Maynard, " The Fallacy of Free Verse/' The Yale Review, XI
(January, 192*), 354.
n6 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Before he left for his summer in Ohio, therefore, Davidson
penned the editorial protest against some of Miss Monroe's state-
ments. Its last paragraph was purposely insulting:
All tribute to Mr. Heyward and Mr. Allen for their achievements!
Undoubtedly the Old South is literary material to those who may care
to write about it. But many may not. It is not the province of any
critic to dictate the material these many shall choose. They will guffaw
at the fiction that the Southern writer of today must embalm and
serve up as an ancient dish. They will create from what is nearest and
deepest in experience whether it be old or new, North, South, East, or
West and what business is that of Aunt Harriet's?
The editorial office of Poetry ', that had been myopic about The
Fugitive for over a year, was keensighted enough to catch a bit of
adverse criticism. In Miss Monroe's absence abroad, Marjorie
Swett wrote a letter of rebuke, which Tatc forwarded to Davidson.
Realizing that they could carry the controversy no further without
antagonizing " the South Carolina folks," d8 Davidson wrote a brief
reply to Miss Swctt, a copy of which he sent to Tate with the
comment that he did not wish to argue much with a " subordinate."
" If Miss M herself says anything further and gives us an opening,
we can let go full blast," he wrote. 39 Tate wrote Miss Swett also,
to make clear that the editors of The Fugitive had not misinter-
preted Miss Monroe:
We do not disagree with Miss Monroe when she emphasizes the
artistic possibilities latent in the traditions of the Old South; nor do
we feel called upon to object if she feels as she evidently does not
that this tradition is the only genuine source for Southern poets to draw
upon .... But we fear very much to have the slightest stress laid
upon Southern traditions in literature; we who are Southerners know
the fatality of such an attitude the old atavism and sentimentality are
always imminent . . . . 40
From Greeley, Ransom commented on the controversy, which, he
* 8 Davidson to Tate, June 26, 1923.
June 29, 1923.
40 June 22, 1923 [carbon copy].
ControversyThe Results of Commitment: 1923 117
wrote, did the group " infinite credit." Nevertheless, he had a little
rather "not altercate with them in print further"; in private, he
said, the Fugitives should find it " amusing during the heat." 41
But Miss Swett said nothing more, and the small exchange was
ended. In the August-September Fugitive the editors printed part
of her letter, which protested that " Miss Monroe would be the last
person in the world to wish to limit the poets of any section of the
country." Commenting upon the disagreement, the fugitive edi-
torial maintained that the " jewel-weighted tradition " of which
Miss Monroe spoke was inaccessible to "many of the present
Southern poets " and concluded, " Whether the limitation be in the
poets or whether there is something fatally oppressive about these
materials most readily obtainable from the past, we do not know.
At any rate, we fear to have too much stress laid on a tradition that
may be called a tradition only when looked at through the haze of
a generous imagination." This belligerent little episode, though
perhaps a bit foolish, is quite characteristic of the Fugitives at this
period, particularly Tate and Davidson, evidencing their excessive
pride and touchiness mingled with their perspicuity and devotion
to principle. It is interesting to note that after this time, for ten
years or more, Poetry maintained a striking ignorance of the exist-
ence of the Nashville poets, despite the growing attention given
them in other quarters.
There were other matters, closer home, even, than the local-
color controversy, that were occupying the minds of the Fugitives
during the summer. One was a financial arrangement with a local
advertising agency managed by Mr. Jacques Back. It was always
to be something of a mystery to most of the Fugitives that a busi-
nessman should have thought a poetry magazine potentially profita-
ble; but the terms of his proposition were constructed so leniently
and agreeably for the members that none of them could find any
conceivable disadvantage in the liaison. Back proposed to under-
take the publication of the magazine on a bimonthly basis, to pay
for the printing and the mailing, and to furnish a minimum of a
41 To Tate, July 14, 1923.
n8 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
hundred free copies for exchange purposes. 42 The editorial com-
mittee was to continue furnishing without the slightest restriction
all reading matter and to supervise the proofreading and compo-
sition. Issues were to be published on or within one week of the
tenth of every second month. At the end of two years the advertis-
ing agency was to render an account and to receive twenty-five
per cent of the net profit, with the members keeping the rest. In
case of deficit, the agency was to bear any loss. The good offices of
such an " angel " were completely unexpected; it was only the
feeling that there must be some sort of catch in the proposal that
kept the group from signing immediately. And it was indeed
strange that here was a man totally removed from the group who
would make such a generous offer. In fact, Back never came to a
Fugitive meeting and remained all along unfamiliar with the poetry
he financed. Stevenson conducted all arrangements with him, and
toward the last part of July the contract was signed; on August 17
Back " took over the proposition." 43 Tate and Stevenson worried
about the outstanding debt owed to the printing firm, Cullom and
Ghertner, which they felt they could hardly ask Back to assume.
They finally decided to assess the brethren pro rata. But after
this time, Back was to handle all business matters: henceforth, it
seemed, the Fugitives could devote themselves solely to writing and
to editorial problems.
A letter from Ransom in July had brought up again the matter
of the editorial policy of the magazine. Christopher Morlcy, Ran-
som's old friend, who wrote in The Literary Review of the New
York Evening Post under the pen name of Kenelm Digby, had
commended The Fugitive in his column. But he had worded his
praise unfortunately. " John Crowe Ransom's ' Fugitive ' especially
interests us," he wrote. " It is quite unexpected in quality." 44
Ransom regretted Morley's error in ascribing the magazine to him
and in an attempt to prevent discord cut out the notice and sent it
to Tate with a few words of explanation and apology: " Friend
41 Jacques Back to Editorial Committee, June 13, 1923.
48 Tate to Davidson, August 18, 1923.
"July 7, I923-
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 119
Digby has done it again, has put my foot in it, as you will remark
from the enclosure. I send it in order to protest my innocence,
and in the hope that Sidney will not compel me to sign another
retraction. Also with my name left out, I should think these few
words of his constitute about the best single exhibit from the press
that we can boast of." 45
But his precaution was not sufficient. The question of the
equality of the editors had from the beginning set Ransom in a
peculiar relation to the whole group. Aware of his more established
reputation and his greater experience, the younger men stubbornly
refused to be drawn into a coterie in which one man dominated.
With his dry good sense, his cutting irony, Ransom was a difficult
influence to resist, however; and during these years together all the
Fugitives acquired something of his manner and a few of his turns
of phrase as well as some of his keen and original ideas. He had
been their teacher; they learned from but did not imitate him. But
as time went on, Ransom was mentioned more and more promi-
nently in connection with The Fugitive. In March, for instance,
David Morton, reprinting Ransom's " In Process of a Noble Alli-
ance," 4fl had designated its author as the editor of The Fugitive;
nothing had been done to correct the error, although some of the
members felt that Ransom himself should have made a public
disclaimer.
When Morley made his reference to the magazine, the mis-
apprehension was not allowed to slide by. Tate had already seen
the notice, and he and Johnson discussed the matter over lunch,
agreeing that Ransom had consistently been given too much credit
for the magazine. 47 The result of this conference was Tate's
admonitory letter to The Literary Review, which Morley subse-
quently reported upon: "Allen Tate, acting managing editor of
The Fugitive, informs us that the paper is not John Crowe Ran-
som's, ' nor mine even, nor truly anybody else's/ It seems that no
one is ever likely to be the editor of it; it is handled by a board
"July 14, 1923.
4i The Bookman, LVII, No. i (March 1923), 36.
47 Tate to Davidson, July 14, 1923.
120 The Fugitive Group. A Literary History
of some thirteen editors, each of whom has as much to say about
it as any other." 48
This incident added weight to some of the members' convic-
tion that the editorial policy of the journal should be changed, since
the work of getting out the publication had settled more and more
on the same shoulders: Davidson's and now that he was back in
Nashville-Tate's.
Ransom had been the chief opponent of the proposal to elect
one of the members editor; and since it seemed that the world
at large regarded Ransom as the editor of the journal, those doing
the work and receiving no credit chafed under what they felt to
be an injustice. Consequently, while Ransom and Davidson were
both away, Tate and Johnson took matters into their own hands by
drawing up a plan for a yearly organization of the magazine. An
editor-in-chief and an associate editor would be elected for each
year, the other Fugitives delegating to these two the functions
which had officially resided in the group but had actually been
performed by a few overworked members.
Tate and Johnson wanted Davidson for editor. But Davidson
felt some hesitancy about accepting the nomination, since he knew
Ransom to be opposed to any change in editorial policy. In July,
Johnson wrote explaining the proposed plan to Davidson in more
detail; he went ahead to clarify the circumstances leading to its
formulation. " All personal factors/' he wrote, were omitted from
consideration:
Moreover, John has mentioned you for editor more than once as
you probably remember, and his objection to the present plan as pre-
sented by Curry last Spring was probably more to table a plan in which
some irritation was concerned than it was any opposition to you. Cer-
tainly it is true that for any one plan, as for any one editor, or other
officers there will be some opposition from someone. That has been
our trouble all along. We must come to that arrangement in which
the majority, the largest majority, can concur. Now it is a foregone
conclusion that the fugitive is going under unless we have a per-
* 8 Thc Literary Review, the New York Evening Post, August u, 1923.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 121
manent (i. e. definite and understandable and workable) organization
that is point number one.
Point number two is, that you are the only one upon whom we can
agree whole-heartedly. If you bust up the plan, you bust up the
Fugitives. The Fugitive may go to smash under your editorship it will
certainly go to smash without your editorship. 49
A previous letter from Davidson had outlined several points which
he thought had to be considered in the plan. Johnson assured
him that each had been provided for: the Back arrangement had
been completed, the duties of the editor and the curtailment of
his power were outlined, and all plans after this time were to be
written in the form of minutes. " As for cooperation and suspi-
cions and laziness and neglect," he continued, ". . . those things
are scarcely predictable, certainly not reducible to writing."
Drawn up by Johnson and Jesse Wills, a resolution proposing
adoption of the Tate-Johnson plan, with Davidson as editor-in-chief
and Tate as assistant editor, had been submitted to all the members
present in Nashville, seven of whom had already approved it before
Johnson wrote his letter. Pointing out that Tate had voted for the
resolution, Johnson urged Davidson's approval. "Personally," he
wrote, " I wish and have wished for some time to release my interest
and time from Fugitive policies and have not felt free to do so in
the past. I can do so now will be pleased, however, to do any
work assigned me." Jesse Wills also wrote Davidson, emphasizing
the necessity for the step taken: "You and Allen are the logical
candidates for the positions named therein. Without honor or title
you have done most of the work up to now. With or without, you
will probably continue to do most of it." 50 Tate, too, felt that
Davidson and he should vote for themselves, since they worked
hardest and were " the only ones who took the trouble to keep up
with ' the current pageant/ " 51
But by the end of July the innovators were made acquainted
with Ransom's sentiments concerning the change. In a letter to
"July 23, 19*3-
50 July 24, 1923-
81 Tate to Davidson, July 24, 1923.
122 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Tate dated July 30 Ransom stated that he was " dead against " the
proposition: "Every member knows we have no editor in the
dictionary sense of that term: then we have no business publishing
on a false basis." Tate wrote Davidson bitterly resenting Ransom's
action but stating that he was glad to have the affair out in the
open. 82 Ransom wrote Jesse Wills in more detail, but Wills never-
theless renewed his pleas to Davidson to accept the position. The
resolution had been approved by everyone except Ransom, Moore t
and Ridley Wills. The last two had not replied to the communica-
tion, Moore because he was " lost in the wilds of Mittel Europa,"
(he and another student were in Germany for the summer) and
Wills because he was " too uxorious " (he had just married) to
answer. 63 Only Ransom, then, opposed the move; and his objection
was not to the choice of persons but to the principle: he opposed
having his name appear in a subordinate position. He had ex-
plained that his intention was not to be arrogant but to hold to
what he understood were the sentiments of "every upstanding
Fugitive." 54
Davidson was in an awkward position. He, too, felt Ransom's
attitude unfair, but he was anxious to restore peace, particularly
since a small private feud on another subject between Ransom and
Tate had been smoldering all during this exchange about Fugitive
business, reaching its climax at almost the same time. The issue of
The Literary Review that printed Tate's correction concerning the
editorship of The Fugitive carried also a letter giving further evi-
dence of dissension among the Fugitives: Ransom's reply to a letter
of Tate's, which was itself written in protest to an article by
Ransom. This minor literary controversy is insignificant in the
light of the strong and lasting friendship between the two men;
yet it is revealing of their fundamentally different casts of mind,
as well as of their courage in a willingness to identify themselves
wholly with the aspect of truth which they grasped. Tate was
later to write of Ransom that he was " the last pure manifestation
" August 2, 1923.
88 Jesse Wills to Davidson, August 5, 1923.
54 As quoted in ibid., August 5, 1923.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 123
of the eighteenth-century South." 5S But, as a matter of fact, Tate
and Ransom both bore a marked resemblance to the eighteenth-
century men of letters; and nowhere is the similitude shown more
clearly than in the " Waste Lands " controversy, in which each of
the friends haughtily labelled the other " dunce."
Ransom had written an essay, "Waste Lands," for William
Rose Benet to print in The Literary Review. In it he attacked T. S.
Eliot's controversial new poem, using it as an immediate oppor-
tunity for expressing some of his objections to the subrational in
poetry. Particularly disquieting to him in " The Waste Land " were
the juxtaposition of incongruous attitudes ("We do not quote
Greek tragedy and modern cockney with the same breath or with
the same kinds of mind ") and the use of " parody " by the weaving
of quotations into inharmonious situations (the " When lovely lady
stoops to folly" passage). According to Ransom, the new poem
showed Eliot's earlier work to have been merely precocious. Con-
cluding his essay with a characteristically easy, ironic paragraph,
he doubted that Eliot's poetry would last: "The genius of our
language is notoriously given to feats of hospitality; but it seems
to me it will be hard pressed to find accommodations at the same
time for two such incompatiblcs as Mr. Wordsworth and the
present Mr. Eliot; and any realist must admit that what happens to
be the prior tenure of the mansion in this case is likely to be stub-
bornly defended." 50
Tate had long been the champion of Eliot to the Fugitives
and could not let Ransom's essay go unrebuked. The long letter
of reply he wrote to The Literary Review treated Ransom coolly,
even somewhat disdainfully, and does seem, as Davidson put it in
an admirable understatement, "a leetle bit pert." 57 It began:
" Sir: John Crowe Ransom's article, "Waste Lands," in the Liter-
ary Review of July 14 violates so thoroughly the principle of free
critical inquiry and at the same time does such scant justice to the
85 " The Eighteenth-Century South," [a review of Two Gentlemen in Bonds]
The Nation, CXXIV (March 30, 1927), 34^.
Ba " Waste Lands," The Literary Review, July 14, 1923.
"To Tate, August 14, 1923.
124 T7?e Fugitive Group: A Literary History
school of so-called philosophic criticism, to which one supposes he
belongs, that it may be of interest to your readers to consider the
possible fallacy of his method and a few of the errors into which
it leads him." 58
Tate condemned the " theory of inspiration " that Ransom had
built up and charged that he had offered " only an abstract restate-
ment of superannuate theories of consciousness/' After defending
Eliot's right to change attitudes from one poem to another and
ridiculing the idea that his first volume was invalidated by his
second, Tate moved in for his concluding blow: " And if tradition
means sameness, then Mr. Eliot cannot survive with Wordsworth.
But Mr. Ransom doesn't say just where it is that poems survive.
However, it is likely that the value of " The Waste Land " as art is
historical rather than intrinsic; but the point of my objection to
John Crowe Ransom's essay is that the method he employs is not
likely to give T. S. Eliot much concern. And my excuse for this
extended objection is that Mr. Ransom is not alone. He is a genre."
In the heat of attack Tate failed to recognize that a friend
could be hurt by the thrusts a mere opponent might find stim-
ulating. That he bore no malice is shown by his mailing Ransom a
copy of the letter before it appeared in print. " It was a bolt from
the blue," 59 Ransom answered, in a tone of reproof. I le enclosed a
counterreply which he said he might or might not send to The
Literary Review. One week following the publication of Tatc's
letter, Ransom's reply appeared. In it his tone kept its customary
urbanity, but his rebuke was unmistakable:
One might gather from this letter that it was written by an enemy
bent on demolishing such scant reputation for scholarship as I might
have laboriously accumulated, when as a matter of fact the author and
I have enjoyed a long and peaceable acquaintance, and it is himself
who sends me a copy of his letter with certain waggish additions for
my private benefit. The truth is, Tate has for two years suffered the
damning experience of being a pupil in my classes, and I take it his
88 " Waste Lands," [letter] The Literary Review, August 4, 1923.
BB To Tate, July 30, 1923.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 125
letter is but a proper token of his final emancipation, composed upon
the occasion of his accession to the ripe age of twenty-three. 80
His "one serious" comment on Tate's argument would be, he
wrote, that the quality which vitiated Eliot's writing was ". . .
precisely the same quality that marks in a greater degree the prose
of Mr. Tate's letter and the work of a whole sodality of younger
critics it abhors the academic (i. e., the honest and thoroughgoing)
method, and is specious, after all, using its glittering scraps of
comment and citation without any convincing assurance that the
subject has been really studied."
Tate had considered his own letter objective, since it took no
notice of personal acquaintance; hence by Ransom's reply he felt
personally injured. He wrote a letter severing all connections with
Ransom but was persuaded by Davidson not to send it. Neverthe-
less, the rift opened and it was to be more than a year before the
persistent warmth of genuine affection would banish the coolness
which followed the heat of argument. The dispute presented a real
complication to Davidson in his attempt to make a decision about
the editorial position. To refuse the office would seem an action
motivated by pique and would add to the resentment of some of
the others toward Ransom. To accept it would be to go against
Ransom's clearly stated objections. But Ransom was a man without
grudges, Davidson knew; so finally, to keep the Fugitives together,
he decided to accept and sent his letter to the group in care of
Tate, urging him to do all he could to promote peace. " You see it
will be impossible or at least extremely embarrassing to operate
the Fugitive under a cloud of controversial give and take." 81 The
letter was, as Davidson himself had termed it, diplomatic, deferring
"further debate" until fall and concluding: "It is unworthy of
us, committed as we are to a wordiy enterprise, to indulge in
strife and recrimination. I wish to subscribe myself to die prin-
ciple of conserving tomahawks and war-whoops for the enemy
abroad, not squandering them among ourselves." 62
* " Mr. Ransom Replies," [letter] The Literary Review, August n, 1923.
61 August 14, 1923.
e * Davidson to the Fugitives, August 14, 1923.
126 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Tate replied that Davidson's letter had struck "exactly the
right note." 6S But the group balance was perilous. Of the three
men chiefly involved, none was capable of assuming a mask of
disinterested altruism. Since they were involved personally, their
principles were also in question; they made no sharp division be-
tween self and ideals. It was this neoclassical quality in their gentle-
manly fight that led Davidson to offer to try to obtain from Ransom
whatever Tate would accept as a " reasonable satisfaction." 64 The
spirit of the old code duello was not dead.
But it was difficult for anyone to remain angry with Ransom.
In the middle of the controversy, for instance, while his relations
with Tate were extremely strained, he wrote a genial letter for-
warding praise which Untermeyer had given the group. The letter
was addressed
Fugitive Editors,
Whoever Ye May Be:
I have just received a jolly 3-page letter from friend Louis Unter-
meyer, mostly personal to myself, but containing matter of profit and
interest to all Fugitives as follows: [He lists a change of address for
Untermeyer and quotes the following passage from his letter:] " Here,
far from the American scene, most of the sounds that issue from
the U. S. poetry magazines come to me with a distressingly similar
thinness. Which is why I write to tell you that the Fugitive has at
least for me a continually increased volume and richness of tone. The
June- July issue has a particularly strong gamut, and, although travel
makes me shed magazines almost as fast as I receive them, I have torn
out the pages devoted to Merrill Moore's four sonnets, your . . . ' First
Travels of Max/ and the . . . ' Spectral Lovers/ " [The deletions are
Ransom's.] 65
When Ransom received Davidson's forwarded letter of accept-
ance, despite his staunch opposition to the change in policy, he
immediately wrote a reply which Davidson considered " in excellent
"August 1 8, 1923.
64 To Tate, August 22, 1923.
"August 1 8, 1923.
ControversyThe Results of Commitment: 1923 127
spirit." fle After tendering Davidson felicitations for a forthcoming
volume of poetry and an academic promotion Ransom went ahead
to say: "At the same time I am not satisfied with our new mast-
head, and must declare my intention of agitation for a change as
soon as I can attend a next meeting, but in doing so I cheerfully
engage to abhor strife and recrimination and to conserve my weak
arsenal of tomahawks and war-whoops against a more appropriate
occasion and to approach the question with a feeling of good will." 8T
His argument was, however, that The Fugitive was of direct
professional importance to most of the members of the group; that
it had been founded with the idea of a group policy, in which no
one's part in the magazine was to seem of less importance than
another's. He concluded: " In stating my personal and selfish atti-
tude, I mean to pose only as an example of what I had heretofore
conceived was the universal (or nearly so) Fugitive opinion."
Davidson took the letter as conciliatory, but when he replied sug-
gested that the group should realize that equality had been a
" purely hypothetical thing " among the members and that actually
they did not make "an equal contribution of time, interest, or
poetry." 8 He was alarmed, however, at the possibility of a serious
breach within the group. As he wrote Tate, "The status of a
group such as ours is bound to be a shifting, bewildering thing at
times. A faculty of operation can be preserved only by genially
winking at each others' faults. We do so most of the time." 69
And a "shifting, bewildering thing" the group appeared to
Tate, who, in the midst of these two controversies, was trying to
get out an issue of the magazine. To Davidson he wrote, ". . . the
griefs and anxieties clustering about the birth of the dear Fugitive
are almost enough to distract the devil from Hell." 70 Tate and
Jesse Wills had been the only ones to read any poetry at the last
meeting, and so the members' contributions were difficult to as-
66 To Tate, August 24, 1923.
67 As quoted, Davidson to Tate, August 30, 1923.
68 To Tate, August 22, 1923.
ttid.
70 July 31, 1923-
128 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
semble. Wills was to have written the editorial for the issue, but,
according to Tate, he procrastinated, leaving Tate the task of writ-
ing it. " As usual," he wrote, " I had to get what you all call the
Tatian taint in somewhere, but luckily I restricted it to the title,
which I couldn't resist." The published issue lacks the taint, how-
ever, and, in fact, has no editorial. Tate must have decided to omit
it at the last minute. But at any rate he finally got the whole thing
to the press, and ended by feeling rather satisfied with its quality:
This issue of the Fugitive will not be so bad, I believe, as we at
first expected. The outside stuff is pretty good, and helps out a lot.
Warren's poem is a first-rate piece of work; that boy is a wonder, or
I'm much mistaken, and deserves election to the Board; I might even
go so far as to say that the Board deserves to have him. Potamkin's
poems are very good, and Percy's is very decent (in the sense of fitting),
and the Contest poems are better this time than before, due to Crane
and, again, to Potamkin. Jesse's two sonnets are excellent, as we've come
to expect; and your poems, while they aren't the best you've done, show
no falling off and will grace the issue. My two poems for Oenia are
trifles, but fairly well done return to the Oenia poem of last summer,
in a way. 71
Tate's estimate of the magazine is a fairly just one. Except for
his omission of any comment on Ransom's excellent " Blackberry
Winter " and on Laura Riding Gottschalk's " Dimensions," one of
the contest poems, his letter to Davidson mentioned most of the
significant poems in the issue.
The contest was bringing in a considerable number of serious
poems, along with many, of course, that were mediocre. Hart
Crane's " Stark Major " was a real acquisition for the magazine, and
Potamkin's " Malidon " was not greatly beneath the group's stan-
dards. As well as attracting contest entries, the publicity attendant
upon the contest drew in from several young poets manuscripts
intended for regular publication. Among these was die work of
Laura Riding Gottschalk, then the wife of an instructor in history
at the University of Louisville. 72 Early in the summer she had
71 Ibid.
79 She had been horn Laura Riding of immigrant parents in New York City,
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 129
sent in poems which, despite their indubitable interest, did not
seem to the editors quite suitable for The Fugitive. Davidson had
written her a commendatory letter, but heard nothing more from
her for a while; later she wrote a note apologizing for her sensitive-
ness to rejection. 78 Further, she promised to send a sizeable col-
lection of her poems at a later date. In the latter part of the sum-
mer she sent in "Dimensions" for the contest, one of her best
poems ever to appear in The Fugitive. Its beginning is sharp and
direct:
Measure me for a burial
That my low stone may neatly say
In a precise, Euclidean way
How I am three-dimensional.
And it ends:
Measure me by myself
And not by time or love or space
Or beauty. Give me this last grace:
That I may be on my low stone
A gage unto myself alone.
I would not have these old faiths fall
To prove that I was nothing at all.
But it would not be until early winter that the editors were to see
a representative body of Mrs. Gottschalk's poems.
In spite of the summer's contention, it had been a profitable
time for most of the Fugitives. Davidson's volume An Outland
Piper had been accepted for publication, and Tate was not much
behind Davidson in finding a publisher. Moreover, he had been
had lived at various places during her childhood, and had gone to Cornell on
a scholarship. She wrote for the college literary paper and became interested in
writing seriously during her three years there. After a brief stay at the University
of Illinois, she gave up academic life to marry Louis Gottschalk and to write.
By the time she encountered The Fugitive, she had had poems printed in Poetry,
Lyric West, Contemporary Verse, The Lyric, The Sewanee Review, Poet Lore,
Nomad, and The Stepladder, had written one novel and several chapters of a
second. (These facts about Miss Riding are taken from an undated letter she
wrote to Davidson sometime in 1924.)
Ti [Summer, 1923].
1 30 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
commended by no less a personage than T. S. Eliot and had placed
a poem in The Modern Review. 7 * Ransom had won the Southern
Prize in the South Carolina Poetry Society Contest. Johnson, dis-
satisfied at Vanderbilt, was desperately seeking to get a start at
supporting himself by writing. In July, when he had written
Davidson concerning the editorial matter, he stated that he had
completed five stories, " four of them pot-boilers that will sell," and
the fifth " an art story which will not sell/' 75 He had also com-
pleted two acts of a three-act play and about fifty pages of a textbook
on the short story.
The Southern literary renaissance was being discerned even by
academic observers such as Addison Hibbard, associate professor
of English at the University of North Carolina, who in an article
for The Literary Review mentioned Ransom and Davidson as two
of the important new Southern poets. 76 To Tatc and Davidson,
the Fugitives who were most vigilant about modern poetry, the
article seemed hopeful, although they both felt that Hibbard should
have distinguished more carefully between groups in the South,
and Tate thought one of his statements that there was nothing like
a school of poetry in the section should be questioned. Tate re-
vealed his essential generosity in rejoicing at the praise Hibbard
had bestowed upon Ransom:
I am especially glad that John came in so prominently; it is the
first time, so far as I know, that his Poems about God has received the
praise it deserves, or even recognition; and if it weren't for the recent
schism between us, which might lead him to misinterpret me, I should
write him a note of congratulation. I think Hibbard could well afford
to leave me out, but I can't deny that I should have liked being men-
tioned; it would have helped my volume along, besides the good it
would naturally have done the Ego. But I am surely glad he men-
tioned you . . . . n
74 William Elliott, who was in Nashville for the summer, had a letter from
T. S. Eliot praising Tate's work, which he had seen in The Fugitive. " I feel
like putting a record on the gramophone," Tate wrote Davidson in his jubilance
(July 31, 1923).
78 July 23, 1923-
76 "The Lyric South," The Literary Review, September i, 1923.
77 To Davidson, September 7, 1923.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 131
Earlier in the letter Tate had voiced his wish that Ransom and
he might be reconciled. He would like, he said, to write Ransom
that he "bore him no ill will and that the controversy was a
closed incident." But he added rather wistfully, "I do believe
that he should approach me first."
When the school year began, the regular meetings were re-
sumed with little change in routine. Curry and Moore were back
from Europe; Ransom and Davidson returned from their summer's
location; Tate, who had just received his degree, decided to stay
on a while in Nashville for the lack of anything better to do; Elliott
and Frierson left for their winter posts. The only real change con-
sisted of the loss of Ridley Wills, who after his marriage went to
New York, where he took a position with The Herald. Most of
the members, then, were present, and the habitual ease of inter-
course among them, established by long practice, was not dimmed
by the summer's tiff.
Actually, the relationship of the Fugitives was of a mysteriously
binding nature. Not dependent on the members' personalities
but on their character and intellect, the ties could not be severed
by mere personal quarrel. William Elliott, writing from the Uni-
versity of California in Berkeley, where he had accepted a position
in the Department of Political Science, discerned the essential
indissolubility of the group of which he both was and was not a
component. Aware of the almost belligerent individuality of the
members and their sometimes passionate disagreements, he was
puzzled at their solidarity. Certain that there was no such phe-
nomenon as a Group Mind, he was yet forced to acknowledge its
existence:
It seemed to me this summer there was some little rumor among
you that The Fugitive was Fugitives.
And yet, God's truth, but you do mightily resemble one another.
Who, that had known Steve these years, would think to find Philomela
going flat on him, too? . . . Tate, that child of wrathful detachment, and
Donald, the excellent Donald of a lyric Spring, now droop into the
replete maturity of summer, and reflective autumn. It may be time, but
132 The Fugitive Group. A Literary History
I should say it is a subtle tribute to the attraction of Johnny's bag of
tricks. You all draw on it.
Perhaps this is no more than to say Johnny was the first modern
among us. He it was who castigated sentimentality wherever it showed
its simple head, and first set up the Baal of complexity for worship. 78
But Elliott felt that the real music of poetry was lost in the mem-
bers' efforts at intellectuality: " I derive considerable comfort from
an occasional lapse from restraint among you, particularly on
Donald's part or Tate's. Your poetry is too social. It is done for
approval . . . ." And he added ruefully, " When a stranger comes
among you, he is a marked man . . . ." Elliott realized that he was
no longer in touch with the perplexing " Group Mind " which he
denied; nevertheless, he was aware that he would never find else-
where the kind of association that the Fugitives had provided:
I honestly miss the talks that Oxford can no longer make up for
the inspiration of Dr. Hirsch, the inevitable soundness of Johnny, the
honest insight of Stanley, Donald's friendly warmth, and Steve's, Bill
Fs cynic search for motives and equally unmotivated good fellowship,
the scintillant and errant Allen, and I'enfant terrible, our Merrill, never
forgetting that Nestor, Dr. Frank. Looking back on our meetings to-
gether I seem to remember most clearly his Druid's brows and calm-
never letting us forget the high regions even while we most mocked.
In the October Fugitive, the first to be published under the
contract with Back, the thirteen poems by Fugitives were nearly
all of a high order. Of Ransom's contributions, two "Judith of
Bethulia" and " Rapunzel "are in one of his favorite genres:
allegory in which persons existing already in myth or legend are
made to bear directly the burden of reanimated and transformed
meaning. Judith, the beautiful and sheltered, becomes in a time of
invasion not only the protectress of herself but of her people.
Yet the awful sight of the beauty with which she accomplishes the
destruction of the enemy fevers the young men in her own camp;
since the victory they have been wild and irrepressible: " Inflamed
78 To Davidson, October n, 1923.
ControversyThe Results of Commitment: 1923 133
by the thought of her naked beauty with desire? / Yes, and chilled
with fear and despair." In the other, Rapunzel, modernized, has
been shorn of her golden hair, and not without some responsibility
for the deed herself, since the poet " accuses " her: " Was it well /
How the old witch has enviously undone you? " She has deprived
herself and her proper lover of consummation :
Do you sit at the casement still,
Braving the ruins of your smile but wanly?
Prince there shall come not till
He may climb to his kiss on a rippling ladder, only.
Another of Ransom's poems in the issue, " The Spiel of the Three
Mountebanks," is written in a doggerel verse, a limping, Hudi-
brastic use of the rhymed couplet almost a burlesque of poetry
itself to set forth Ransom's confirmed Pyrrhonism.
Davidson's three poems arc different enough from Ransom's
to make it evident that the resemblance Bill Elliott found among
the Fugitives was one best seen by intimates. In Davidson's work
the themes do not derive from an obliquely slanted insight but
come from an almost Wordsworthian simplicity of poetic concep-
tion. And yet the poems are modern ones, proper products of their
time. Two are wholly successful, evidencing Davidson's remark-
able ability to absorb modernity into traditional forms rather than
to submit to or compromise with it. In " Stone and Roses," the
author draws a quiet and simple portrait with an easy flow of meter
and language, and in " Old Harp " he strikes up an elegiac rhythm
to sing a lament for lost songs.
One of Tate's two poems is a sonnet, tightly rhymed and
linguistically condensed. In both poems the language is bright,
put together with the impact of a fresh and startling mental context.
Of the remaining members' poems, Stevenson's and Johnson's are
most noteworthy. Soon to become a member, Warren contributed
a poem, " Midnight," which is one of his most sustained pieces to
appear in The fugitive. Striking immediately through the care-
fully protected surface of events it moves to a world of psychological
horror beneath:
134 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
1 cannot sleep at night for dread
Of terrible green moons that haunted once
The dark above our marriage-bed ....
The poem drives on through its murky images to a conclusion that,
although not free of the Eliot influence, reveals an anguish far
beyond the realm of any derivation:
Your gaunt uncomprehending eyes
Clutch at me as I start to rise,
Rattling my newspaper, saying, " It is late."
You draw the pins, release your flood of hair.
Am I doomed to stand thus ever,
Hesitating on the stair?
The other visitors present in the issue Joseph T. Shipley, Harry
Alan Potamkin, and Henri Faust offered creditable if not entirely
memorable pieces. The issue is marred somewhat by its female
contestants, except for Laura Riding Gottschalk. But taken as a
whole, it is a fine collection of poems with which the Fugitives
greeted the oncoming winter of teaching and work.
The local public for the poets, however, was becoming less
enthusiastic as time passed. Nashville citizens in general had begun
to regard the young men as crazy or wild, or deliberately unintelli-
gible. T. H. Alexander, a local newspaperman who had attended
Vanderbilt back in the days when Davidson was a student, devoted
two columns to good-humored sallies against Fugitive obscurity:
" We generally read it [Fugitive poetry] frontward first, and then
try reading it backward like a Chinese laundry ticket, but we never
succeed in finding what it's all about." 79
But if the Nashville reading public was finding the group
bizarre, literary men elsewhere were taking increasing notice of
the magazine. One of the most direct and enthusiastic bits of
approbation came from William Stanley Braithwaite, American
Negro poet and anthologist, who had been since 1913 publishing
an anthology of " the best magazine verse " each year. In the
79 The Nashville Tennessean, September 22, 1923.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 135
October 6 Book Section of the Boston Evening Transcript he wrote
a review of The Fugitive which was unqualified in its commen-
dation. Announcing the contents of the 1923 edition of his annual
anthology, in which were to be found seventeen poems by the
Fugitive group, Braithwaite devoted a large portion of his article
to the Nashville poets. After stating that the multiplicity of poetry
journals in America was a hindrance to the development of the art,
since most of them, dependent upon the financial support of their
members, published chiefly their own work, Braithwaite continued:
There are exceptions here and there in which the group has been
fortunate in the assembling and cohesion of its talents. An example
I have in mind is The Fugitive, published at Nashville, Tenn. This
poetry magazine displayed more character and originality during the
last year than any magazine in the country. One found often in its
pages themes, and the treatment of themes, that were often too strong
with the tang of originality. There was, nevertheless, time and again,
power of vision, and the very certain note of individuality.
He named the Fugitive members, praising them for their individual
talents, and his final estimate of the group was strongly favorable:
" This group seems wholly absorbed in functioning artistically and
wasting no time on propaganda or self-advertising. These men are
going to be heard from in no uncertain accents when the clamor
of pride and authority has subsided in certain literary capitals."
The group was, of course, pleased at such detailed and approv-
ing criticism: writing to thank Braithwaite, Davidson expressed the
genuine appreciation of all the Fugitives:
We want you to know that, whatever encouragement we have
got from other people, your notice of us has been the clearest and most
unqualified recognition we have received since we began publishing the
Fugitive, a little over a year ago. And we should like for you to know
also that your words represent our purposes and outlook however
short we may fall of recognizing them only as we should have cared to
represent them ourselves if avowals of attitude could ever be counten-
anced. To us this is the best phase of your remarks bearing on our
work; it is no mean encouragement to a group of writers, isolated from
136 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
the main stream of current letters in an environment none too friendly
to the arts, to be able to feel that we are understood by a critic for
whose work we have no inconsiderable respect. 80
Braithwaite's perception in this instance should not be mini-
mized; nevertheless, it is a peculiar and ironic phenomenon in
the life of The Fugitive that most of its literary sponsorship came
from such critics as Christopher Morley, Witter Bynner, Louis
Untermeycr, and William Stanley Braithwaite, all well-known
figures on the literary scene in the twenties. These seem now
strange men to have appreciated a group of poets so metaphysical,
so hard in their intellectuality, so counter to popular taste as
Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren.
One wonders at the lack of any alliance between the Fugitives
and the most distinguished poets and critics in both England and
America. It can be explained only by the admission that Fugitive
poetry, during the time of the magazine, was " unstylish." It did
not appeal to the young advance-guard experimentalists who were
making their headquarters in New York and abroad and always,
wherever they were, rebelling against the values of their society.
For some of these dislocated persons, Marxism was the only refuge
in a world that seemed to be falling into chaos; for others, salvation
lay in an aestheticism in which art was superior to life and inde-
pendent of it. Neither of these groups had anything but scorn
for the writer who accepted the old forms and beliefs without first
performing the " great labor of destruction and negation." 81 And
the Fugitives were not social revolutionists nor, except for Tate,
poetic experimentalists. They made use of traditional conventions
in their poetry in a natural and unselfconscious manner that must
have seemed, to the young litterateurs of New York, perfectly un-
distinguished and trite. Consequently they were not taken up into
the sophisticated literary world of the day, and the men of real
taste did not encounter them until later.
"October 18, 1923 [carbon copy].
81 Dadaist Manifesto; quoted in Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return (New
York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1934), 159.
ves Add to Literati Honors Of Ten*
ftjifjKir "*'* ism ' j
_ .-'..,,,.- v
** ** ''" *?'$ 'f '%'}*
%H0?::
1 :"?'iiJ
The Nashville Tennesseaii full-page spread featuring the Fugitive
a year after the founding of their magazine.
Kissam Hall, the men's dormitory at Vanderbilt. Here, as young profes-
sors, Ransom and Curry had their residence and several of the Fugitives
occupied student quarters. The Calumet Club, a literary group to which
most of the Fugitives belonged, met here in the 191 o's and 1920'$,
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 137
To men like Untermeycr and Braithwaite, who were not in-
tense enough in their commitment to poetry to suffer the pangs of
dissociation that other more serious literary men felt, the Fugitive
poems offered lines that were neither shocking and unintelligible
nor sentimental and ordinary. Such men were unable to discern
that what they considered "flaws" in Ransoms and Davidson's
poetry were integral; they failed to perceive the essential character
of the poetry which they graciously sponsored.
Among Southern literary men, The Fugitive was warmly ap-
preciated, although actually more for its function of promoting
Southern literature than for its intrinsic merit. John McClure of
The Double Dealer was an exception; he had made available the
pages of his magazine to individual Fugitives from time to time,
recognizing and applauding their ability. The Poetry Society of
South Carolina, eager to sponsor poetry throughout the South,
had established friendly relations with the Nashville group from
the first. Ilervey Allen, for instance, wrote to Davidson: "We
all value ' The Fugitive ' very much, and appreciate enormously
the genuine work being done by your group. A little more fighting
by the present generation and the old sentimental ghosts will be
pretty well laid or confined to their natural habitat, the country
churchyard." 82 Other members Josephine Pinckney, Henry Bel-
lamann, and DuBose Heyward had written sending their good
wishes. W. A. Percy, connected with no special group but pos-
sessed of his own following, contributed several poems to the maga-
zine and had agreed to act as judge in the contest; and, although,
as he admitted, he did not always like The Fugitive, he did like
the spirit of it. 83
The contest publicity had been gratifying; such periodicals as
the New York World, the New York Times, the San Francisco
Chronicle, the Cleveland Times, Poetry, The Lyric, and Alls Well
had carried notices of the prizes offered. As the Fugitives reported
to die Associated Retailers, more than four hundred poets had sent
* November 8, 1923.
"To Davidson, July 23, 1923.
138 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
in verses, every state in the union being represented, as well as
Mexico, the Philippines, Belgium, Canada, and Hawaii. 84 The three
judges were instructed to rank the poems from one to twelve for
the Nashville Prize and from one to six for the Ward-Belmont
Prize and to return their decisions along with any comment by
November 19 in order that the magazine might go to press by
November 22.
The results of the contest were a little startling. With judges
of so different bent, the club members no doubt expected fairly
large divergencies of opinion; but they could not have expected
each judge's choice for first prize to find no place at all in the
listings of the other two. Munson selected Crane's " Stark Major,"
which he considered a genuinely distinguished poem, for first place,
Auslander's " Berceuse for Birds " for second place, and Mrs. Gotts-
chalk's "Daniel" for third. "Crusade" by Warren he placed
fourth, "O Savage Love," by Miss Purnell fifth, and "Malidon,"
by Potamkin sixth. The remaining poems he rated in the seventh
place, since he felt there was no real distinction among them; but
on being requested by the editors to rank them, he rather half-
heartedly decided on ratings for the other six. As for the Ward-
Belmont prize, Munson was convinced that no prize should be
awarded, since he found in none of the entries " any musical in-
terest or any metaphorical ingenuity or any sense of an intelligence,
however immature, dancing back of the words." 85
Significantly enough, Percy's reaction to the contest was ex-
actly the reverse of Munson's. Percy found judging difficult
because the Ward-Belmont poems were so good and the Nashville
poems so mediocre! 88 In the Nashville contest, he ranked first
Shipley's poem, which Munson had placed last; and in twelfth
place he put Crane's poem, which Munson had rated as first.
Miss Rittenhouse, too, placed Crane's poem twelfth on the
list; and altogether there was so little agreement among the judges
" Report of the Administration of the Nashville Prize, made to die Associated
Retailers, October 20, 1923 [carbon copy").
" The Fugitive, II, No. 10 (December, 1923), 163.
8H Percy to Davidson, November 6, 1923.
Controversy The Results of Commitment: 1923 139
that the final decision was necessarily a mathematical one. Rose
Henderson's " A Song of Death/' with the ratings of tenth place
(Munson), second (Rittcnhousc), and third (Percy) tied with
Auslandcr's "Berceuse for Birds," ranked as second (Munson),
sixth (Rittenhousc), and seventh (Percy). The Ward-Belmont
contest, based on the opinions of only two judges, was won by
Louise Patterson Guyol, of Smith College, with her "Chart
Showing Rain, Winds, Isothermal Lines and Ocean Currents."
Roberta Tealc Swartz of Mount Holyoke College and Margaret
Skavlan of the University of Oregon tied for second place.
The contest results, revealing as they did die unresolved dichoto-
my in the consciously held aesthetic of the Fugitives (not greatly
present in their actual practice), proved somewhat embarrassing.
But out of the debris emerged, at any rate in the eyes of the group,
two real winners who, through the medium of the contest, won
their way into the pages of The Fugitive and finally into its mem-
bership roll: Robert Pcnn Warren and Laura Riding Gottschalk.
Warren had appeared first in the magazine in the June- July issue,
his poem " Crusade " being one of the three chosen by the editors
for the first heat in the Nashville prize contest. Mrs. Gottschalk
had appeared first in the succeeding issue, in which " Dimensions "
had been selected by the editors.
Warren, of course, through his close association with the group
had convinced the members of his genius. Mrs. Gottschalk, sepa-
rated from the center of Fugitive activity, had made her conquest
solely through her poetry, Sometime near the first of December
she had sent a great packet of her verses to the editors, almost
overwhelming Davidson and Tate, who both read them with great
enthusiasm. Tate, recovering from a bout with influenza, took
time to write her a letter of serious praise, which struck deep into
this strange and turbulent girl. Starved for admiration and fellow-
ship, she replied with a touching and sober letter which perhaps
overstated the importance to her of the group's encouragement. 87
Tate, Davidson, and Warren were certain that they had discovered
87 December 12, 1923.
140 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
a real poet; the verses she sent them were impressive bold, direct,
hard, thoughtful. In his letter reporting on the contest to Miss
Rittenhouse, who had praised Mrs. Gottschalk's "Dimensions,"
Davidson expressed his confidence in the young poet's ability:
" Before long we shall be publishing a group of her poems which
we hope will further confirm good opinions. We consider her
particularly in view of her work that has recently come to us our
most interesting and promising ' discovery ' of the year." 88
The year was ending in a mood of heady power for the Fugi-
tives, certain in their innocence that good poets could be discovered
and developed by a disinterested though passionate concern for
poetry alone. And though the December issue of the magazine was
not so interesting as its predecessor, it was remarkable in its repre-
sentation of more Fugitives than any of the preceding numbers
during the year: only Frierson and Hirsch were absent. The more
critical members recognized that all the poems in the issue were
not exceptional; but they were firm in their conviction that the
group publication was headed in the right direction that without
the sponsorship of commercial publishers, without the whole para-
phernalia of literary connections, amateurs devoted to the art of
poetry could write good poetry and find a hearing.
1 December 15, 1923.
CHAPTER SIX
jftdfW^
THE BEGINNINGS OF
CRITICAL THEORY:
1924
THE YEAR 1924 marks the high point of The
Fugitives course. It was the last year in which editorial tasks were
performed in an amateur fashion, with the whole group still taking
an active part in the magazine's affairs. Hereafter, the group dis-
integration would begin, as more members found that the joint
project could no longer occupy first place in their hearts and minds.
It was during this year that the ones seriously dedicated to literature
found themselves set apart within the group by their intensive study
of the art of poetry; and, although afterward they were to recognize
that they were bound as persons to discharge a responsibility to the
body politic and economic, now they were content in the vocation of
letters, cultivating their craft with single-minded attention. They
published books, wrote reviews, and experimented in both poetry
and criticism.
Indication of a growing concern for the profession of letters is
to be found in the Editorial Comment of the February, 1924,
141
142 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Fugitive: "Poetry is now having a hearing [in the South], where
for a long time the audience has been negligible. The next need
is critics. And may these not be long in coming." As token of its
own interest in criticism, The Fitgitive carried in the same issue the
first of a series of brief critical essays, Ransom's " The Future of
Poetry." A delineation of the dangers inherent to poetry in what
he termed "Modernism," Ransom's essay continued his defense
of traditional techniques for the poetic medium. Again he con-
cerned himself primarily with the problem of prosody, this time
openly deploring the modern abandonment of meter. As justifica-
tion for this position he wrote:
... it does not seem too hazardous to claim that poetry, as one of the
formal arts, has for its specific problem to play a dual role with words:
to conduct a logical sequence with their meanings on the one hand; and
to realize an objective pattern with their sounds on the other. Now
between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no
discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miracu-
lous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a
uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes. It is a miracle of
harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward neces-
sity of things.
But we moderns are impatient and destructive. We forget entirely
the enormous technical difficulty of the poetic art; and we examine the
meanings of poems with a more and more microscopic analysis; we
examine them in fact just as strictly as we examine the meanings of a
prose which was composed without any handicap of metrical distrac-
tions; and we do not obtain so readily as our fathers the ecstasy which is
the total effect of poetry, the sense of miracle before the union of inner
meaning and objective form. Our souls are not, in fact, in the enjoy-
ment of full good health. For no art and no religion is possible until
we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible
of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.
In poetry specifically, Ransom continued, the modern mind scorned
the admission into a poem of the " certain amount of nonsense "
(archaisms, inversions, illegal accents) needed to provide the neces-
sary latitude for the construction of form. The result of this en-
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 143
forced rigidity among poets was, he believed, a kind of paralysis;
they were immobilized in the knowledge of their own inability
to perform flawlessly. Under these circumstances, he feared, the
future of poetry could not assuredly be considered immense.
Certainly in his own poetry Ransom was finding the problem
of form pressing. He was constantly working toward perfection of
the ritual with which he adapted the "inner meaning" to the
" objective form." For him the very fear of the formal cliche led
to its parody; and through ironic parody came freedom. Thus, in
" Captain Carpenter," " Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," and
"Prometheus in Straits," all appearing in the same issue as the
critical article, the " miracle of harmony " that Ransom described
as the total effect of poetry has been accomplished, partly through
the wry and tactful use of the cliche. " Captain Carpenter " is
consciously archaic, beginning
Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime
Put on his pistols and went riding out
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.
It was a pretty lady and all her train
That played with him so sweetly but before
An hour she'd taken a sword with all her main
And twined him of his nose for evermore.
And " Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," too, is intentionally
old-fashioned in its tone:
There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder that her brown study
Astonishes us all.
Her wars were bruited in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond,
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
144 The Fugitive Group. A Literary History
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,
For the tireless heart within the little
Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple dreams, and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!
But now go the bells, and we are ready;
In one house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her hrown study,
Lying so primly propped.
In these poems the quaintly pedantic language, the ballad meter,
and the awkward rhyme are given grace by an ironic tone and a
fairy-tale atmosphere all providing aesthetic distance, so that tech-
nique functions not as a shackle but as a tool in the cohesive though
multileveled meaning.
But his solutionthe tenderly mocking use of conventional
methods was not the one for other Fugitives. Davidson's single
piece in the issue, "The Old Man of Thorn," although super-
ficially like Ransom's poems, since it uses the ballad stanza colored
by a pervasive irony, is totally unlike them in spirit:
Eph Dickon the old man
The old man of Thorn,
Plants thistles in cornfields
As other men plant corn.
Davidson's irony is at once simpler and more mordant than Ran-
som's; in effect, it is a kind of lyricism in reverse. " The Old Man
of Thorn " has a sureness of musical line that gives it none of the
small ironic effects of the bumptious " Captain Carpenter."
Tate's single poem in the issue, " Touselled " (which the group
did not like), indicates that its author was not concerned with the
problem of form as Ransom described it. The difference between
poetry and prose, for Tate, lay not in meter or rhyme, but in the
exemplary nature of the poetic language itself, which, drawing
upon both sense and intellect simultaneously, must present directly
and not state. Tate was already committed to a carefully critical
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 145
attitude toward his poetic language: consequently a poem such as
" Touselled," though murky and disconnected in its rational frame-
work, nevertheless shows a brilliant juxtaposition of vivid word-
groups:
Unhappily fractured music in the scene
Spills a hollow bird, perched
On the bony Fall. Drip drip
Sharply, vertically sharp the drops
Plunged from the eaves . . . No wonder an interval
Stalked by twin demons, Day and Night,
Is defeated: it is a bastard hour, waiting
While drops drop and wet warbles slight,
Arise, hesitate on crooked legs of mist.
No wonder, I say, dusk with her meek
Redundancy of line, in one touselled color,
Shrinks to a splotch of shaky black, albeit
Inspiring with haste the bored philosopher.
To Merrill Moore poetic form presented no problem. He had
come upon his "sonnet" form a year before and after this year
would not desert it. Within its loosened limits he found the dura-
tion he required for his lively utterance, his poems from beginning
to end frequently being made up of a single sentence. In the
February issue, where he was represented by four pieces, his run-on
lines fit together with remarkable ease, particularly in the sonnet
" From a Conversation in the Chateau Garden ":
Those who could read erasures from a wall
Of roses told me ivy had grown before
Over the trellis and the iron door
Now heavy with August, where leaves never fall
But flutter as frantic as the roses laugh
Over walls where ivy once grew in the time
When the castle was more than forgettable rhyme
And its walls not such a feudal cenotaph
They told me ivy had grown and added this
That marble lends not so much to perpetuity
Perhaps, as a rose seed, even, or a kiss,
146 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
And that fugitive beauty finds a security
Being caught and gathered away in some frail breast
That dies and makes the earth a palimpsest.
The felicitous rhythm in these lines is all the more notable in
being not perfectly regular, but full of the stress and pitch of actual
speech. It is as though the artificial patterns of poetry were so
familiar to Moore that he was able to think in them directly, with-
out danger of falling into sing-song meter or false and imitative
phrases.
Laura Riding Gottschalk illustrated, more than did Tate, the
formlessness that Ransom feared. She was represented by four
poems, her first "comprehensive group" to be published in the
magazine. Her writing, though as immediate and unchecked as
Moore's and as full of the vitality of a fresh and original insight-
found its natural expression in vers libre. At its worst, her poetic
utterance was in the fragmentary and aphoristic vein toward which
free verse tends. At its best, her style grew organically from a
happy fusion of form and substance, as this passage from her poem
"The Quids "illustrates:
The little quids, the million quids,
The everywhere, everything, always quids,
The atoms of the Monoton
Each turned three essences where it stood
And ground a gisty dust from its neighbors' edges
Until a powdery thoughtfall stormed in and out.
The cerebration of a slippery quid enterprise.
Each quid stirred.
The united quids
Waved through a sinuous decision.
The quids, that had never done anything before
But be, be, be, be, be,
The quids resolved to predicate
And dissipate in a little grammar.
This is the poem that later so attracted Robert Graves that he was
led to write to its author, offering her a position in the University
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 147
of Cairo, where he was himself teaching. The Fugitives were no
less impressed with it. On his way to Lumberport, West Virginia,
to accept a high school teaching position, Allen Tate went by Louis-
ville to get a sight of Mrs. Gottschalk. He found her a startling
person: " Her intelligence is pervasive," he wrote Davidson; " It is
in every inflexion of her voice, every gesture .... But always you
get the conviction that the Devil and all Pandemonium couldn't
dissuade her of her tendency." J
In this same month Davidson began a project that he and Tate
had considered for two years or more the editorship of a book page
for the Nashville Tennessean, published by the colorful Luke Lea.
For his reviewers Davidson made use of a large store of literary
acquaintances and students, as well as his fellow Fugitives. Within
the page, Davidson himself conducted a column" The Spyglass "
wherein he commented on the weekly scene, emphasizing South-
ern literary affairs, with the aim of stimulating interest in the poetic
movement stirring the section. Davidson's editorship of the page
was to last until 1930, when Luke Lea's empire collapsed and the
Tennessean began to feel the first severe effects of the depression.
It was an excellent page during its whole career, but particularly
in 1924 did it offer the Fugitives the chance to make public state-
ments about current literature. For the four chief Fugitives-
Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren it provided an outlet for
honest critical writing, which at this stage of their development
was extremely valuable. Tate in particular learned from the dis-
cipline of reviewing books assigned to him. His prose style had
always puzzled the other members of the group, and he acknowl-
edged in it himself an excessive turgidity. In his writing for the
page Tate was willing to make changes whenever Davidson sug-
gested: " I'm going to do my best to write the reviews as you require
them," he wrote, " and if they don't suit you, send them back with
the wicked parts of them marked; I'll revise and try them on you
again." 2
1 February 21, 1 9 24.
* To Davidson, March 8, 1924.
148 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
The outlook for The Fugitive, however, was not bright. The
group was in debt, still owing the printers, Cullom and Ghertner,
almost a hundred dollars on the " old account of The Fugitive" 3
and members were undecided about a policy for perpetuating the
magazine. In West Virginia, Tate thought he should resign his
editorial office: the only reason he saw for not doing so was the
possibility of returning to Nashville for the summer, since "all
things considered, it [was] still the most congenial place." 4 Re-
flecting on the lack of sympathy his views received from many of
the other Fugitives, however, he was inclined to think he should
resign. Davidson dissuaded him; yet he too felt that things were
going badly with the group. He still believed, notwithstanding,
that a large-scale resurgence was possible within the circle. "If
there is any leadership in Southern literary affairs it ought to be
here," he wrote, but the precarious financing of the journal made
its prospects for continuance gloomy. 5
Tate replied to Davidson's troubled report: "I balk at the
prospect of our suspension . . . ." Money was not the chief trouble,
he was certain. " Despite financial desperation," he wrote, " we
could survive if we had enthusiasm (we ran a year before Back
came; enthusiasm did it)." Tate was convinced that leadership for
The Fugitive would have to come from Davidson and himself; the
others were either committed elsewhere or limited by a lack of
experience. Once Davidson had asked Tate if he took the magazine
quite seriously, and Tate felt it necessary now to affirm his concern:
" My recalcitrancy has been the measure of my enthusiasm," he
stated. Justifying his attitude, he explained:
I think you were aware of my rather impatiently critical dissatisfac-
tion with various compromises we were forced to make; I always accept
compromises, but I can't conscientiously do it without asserting the
principle of my objection. You may be sure that if I hadn't been
deeply interested I wouldn't have ever asserted this principle, i. e., made
* Cullom and Ghertner to Davidson, June 25, 1924.
4 Tate to Davidson, March 3, 1924.
*To Tate, March 15, 1924.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 149
myself disagreeable, t was probably wrong a good deal of the time,
but I felt like upholding what I thought was right. 6
In a letter written a few days later, Tate outlined the three courses
open to the group, as he saw them: first, to suspend the magazine
a policy which he feared would have to be adopted within the year;
second, to unite with the Poetry Society of South Carolina a step
to which he would object, since it would discard the identity of
The Fugitive; and third, to obtain a patron but "alas, there are
no more Medicis." 7
Teaching in the Lumberport high school, with four classes in
English and one in Latin, Tate was trying to save money for an
escape to New York. With nothing much else to do in the small
town, he spent about nine hours a day at his writing and study. 8
The projected volume of his poetry had not materialized, since
his publishers, Liebcr and Lewis, had gone into bankruptcy soon
after accepting his manuscript. Tate had sent the returned poems
to several other publishers without success and was now beginning
to realize that he no longer cared greatly about seeing them in
print: " As I look back on the past four years of my verse-writing,
I recall that I was aware that I might have worked any two or three
tendencies I experimented with and to as much success as attaches
to the average volume of ' good verse . . . but intellectual unrest
over formal problems and an impatience with the meager statement
imposed by the demand of intelligibility have about undone me." 9
The tics between Davidson and Tate were the strongest within
the group; hence their influence in each other's lives was not really
weakened by distance. Warren more than Davidson felt Tare's
absence, since Warren was as yet unformed in his convictions and
badly in need of the daily companionship in serving the Muse
that Tate's friendship had offered. " I value your criticism a good
deal more than any other that I receive," he wrote, " for you know
the sort that comes out in a Fugitive meeting." 10 Younger by
6 To Davidson, March 24, 1924.
7 To Davidson, March 27, 1924.
Tate to Davidson, February 21, 1924.
"Tate to Davidson, March 3, 1924.
10 To Tate, March 21, 1924.
1 50 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
several years than most of the other Fugitives, Warren felt that
he approached poetry with a different attitude from theirs, an
attitude which they did not sufficiently respect. Poetry to him was
a matter of life and death; it was not, as he sometimes thought it
to be with the others, a pleasant hobby or a means of exhibiting
erudition. He described his resentment in a letter to Tate:
As I expected, my poem Romance Macaber was rather poorly
received by the majority of the members. " Morbid, affected, uncon-
vincing "were among various criticisms applied. Hirsch with custo-
mary pomp inquired if the thing was not extremely personal: " the
expression of an extremely personal passion and emotion, etc." I was
compelled to reply that had it been I would never have read it to the
company there assembled . . . - 11
This spring marked an emotional crisis for Warren; a sensitive
youth who had always been something of a prodigy in everything
he attempted, he came to literature with a brooding intensity. Tate
had greatly influenced his writing, and the group considered him
in a sense a follower of Tate's. " 1 am content for the moment at
least," Warren wrote, "and you should be happy for a bright
disciple." 12 Tate was a dedicated champion of Warren from both
personal affection and honest belief in the young man's genius.
Concerning poems that Warren had contributed to the Tennessean
book page, Tate wrote to Davidson: "That boys a wonder has
more sheer genius than any of us; watch him: his work from now
on will have what none of us can achieve power." 13
Wherever he felt praise due, Tate was always generous. Nine
days later, he was enthusiastic about another Fugitive's power as
poet. Davidson had sent to Lumberport a few manuscripts that
had been read at a Fugitive meeting. Tate was not impressed with
the poems, except for one a long poem of Jesse Wills's, which he
considered the best poem yet produced by a Fugitive. 1 *
11 [Early spring, 1924].
"ttii
1S April 17, 1924.
14 Tate to Davidson, April 26, 1924. The poem was probably "Eden,"
published in the June, 1924, Fugitive.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 151
Tate's critical opinions made up the content of the second
essay published in The Fugitive. Appearing in the April number
of the magazine, Tate's article was a reply to Ransom's predictions
about the future of poetry, stated in the preceding issue. Under
the heading, " One Escape from the Dilemma," Tate set out vigor-
ously on his task of refutation. First of all, he would not admit that
poetry is obligated to use words in a "dual role," to fit meaning
into form. " If this were so," he wrote, " poetry would in no wise
differ from prose except in the antic capacity of diverting us with
a spectacle of virtuosity, of difficulty ingeniously overcome." In
such an interpretation, Tate continued, poetry would possess the
same content as prose; it would be concerned with " the rational
exposition, rather than with the pure presentation, of intuitions or
ideas." Wordsworth and Ransom saw no essential difference, Tate
charged, between the diction of poetry and prose; hence Ransom
could ascribe the failure of free verse to its lacking the "indis-
pensable metrical scheme." Tate was willing to agree that free
verse had failed; " but this does not mean," he wrote, " that a few
writers who have written what we name free verse are negligible."
In fact, Tate hesitated to divide the strains of modern poetry into
" Old " and " New ": " For the older song has assumed a variation
as I believe, a development, and is in a very real sense more tra-
ditional than any other mode practised by poets of the present time.
Repetition, we seem to be saying, isn't tradition . . . ." Certainly
the modern poet of whatever sort must modify the ordinary diction;
he was forced
to a breaking up of a poetic idiom which, through the course of English
poetry, has been rooted in the vitality of spontaneous expression ....
But today the poet's vocabulary is prodigious, it embraces the entire
range of consciousness .... Baudelaire's Theory of Correspondences
that an idea out of one class of experience may be dressed up in the
vocabulary of another is at once the backbone of Modern poetic diction
and the character which distinguishes it from both the English Tradi-
tion and free verse (an escape from the dilemma of J. C. R.).
Actually, Tate held, none of the " radical " poets could be con-
152. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
sidered writers of vers libre, since all of them used traditional
techniques, but with utter casualness. Their devices were set up
in order to be destroyed and so to give a greater "illusion of
freedom." The real poet of the age, aware that " Poetry the oracle "
was gone, recognized that modern society had no myth other than
machinery; " but at least our poet is aware of his own age, barren
for any art though it may be, for he can't write like Homer or
Milton now; from the data of his experience he infers only a
distracting complexity."
Tate's contention that the modern poet, regardless of the form
he used, was driven to modifications of the standard forms of
diction is aptly illustrated in some of the best poetry of the April
issue of the magazine the three sonnets by Jesse Wills and the
two sonnets and one three-quatrained piece by Robert Penn
Warren, who had been added to the masthead in the previous issue.
Wills's sonnets are grouped under the title "Snow Prayers," and
the language is masculine and modern, as the following passages
indicate:
Dead years ring
With blizzards, rivers frozen, wagging tongue,
Beard like a city drift, and wheezy lung
Mourn times corrupt, and change a bitter thing.
When the lotus folk shall stir to a ghostly woe,
Glimpsing across dim gardens and lagoons
White-winged, their boreal heritage of snow.
The other poet whom Tate considered to have real power, Warren,
exhibits also a diction distinctively modern in his first sonnet of the
issue, an early version of his later " Iron Beach ":
Beyond this bitter shore there is no going,
This iron beach, this tattered verge of land;
Behind us now the tundra dims with snowing,
In front the seas leap crashing on the strand.
Faintly the sun wheels down its quickened arc
While at our backs with inexorable motion
Earth swings forgotten cities into dark
And night sweeps up across the polar ocean.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 153
This place has its own peace, assuredly.
Here we, once waked by tramcars in the street,
Shall rest in unperturbed austerity,
Hearing the surf interminably beat,
Watching the pole star overhead until
The arctic summer brings the carrion gull.
Ransom's contributions to the issue are " Ada Ruel " and " Old
Mansion/' one of his most mature and seasoned poems. Davidson
was represented by " Fiddler Dow," a long ballad-like version of
the danse macabre, and by " Prelude in a Garden," a sensitive por-
trayal of a moment between lovers when they are aware of their
vulnerability. The setting is in a protected garden, where the two
arc about to come together in love and tenderness:
But there, or ever love could take its captive,
Before the lips could meet or arms entwine,
They saw a face flashed up within the fountain,
An old god entering at his favorite shrine.
Invisibly revealed against their summer
They marked a presence, beautiful, severe,
And knew it well, that much too smiling phantom
Nodding out doom where love was warm and near.
Their bodies, that were sealed for dissolution,
Chilled in the fragrant air. A somber breath
Smote on their flesh with hindering strange assailment
Reminding them that love begins with death.
Or death begins with love. They named it not.
After the magic pause were charmed no more.
Too gallant to remember they were mortal,
They kissed, as they had minded to before.
Of this poem, Tate wrote that he had been certain at first that
it was Ransom's. 10 He began to recognize Davidson as he read on,
but he still felt one line in particular was Ransomian. " I'm a jelly-
15 To Davidson, April 14, 1924.
154 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
fish/' he wrote, "if line four isn't John's! " lfl Tate considered the
whole issue " mighty good "; one of Moore's sonnets was not quite
worthy of print, he feared, but Curry's " neat quatrains " were " the
best, by damn, he's done in a good while."
No poem by Tate was used in the issue, although he had sub-
mitted one (probably " Credo," which appeared in the subsequent
issue). Ransom apologized to Tate for not using it: "As a substi-
tute member of the Selection Committee (in Jesse's place) I might
say it was declined for the April number on the ground that the
prose piece of the same author's was already pretty esoteric, and
more of the same might have tended to excess." 1T In the same
letter Ransom took up the question of Tate's editorial, discussing
what he called "some of the fine ideas ... so precariously and
prodigally therein hinted at." If, as he seemed to do, Tate defined
poetry as having to do with " verse forms and kindred parapher-
nalia," Ransom wondered how a man could " ' casually ' use these
paraphernalia when he knows he must." Furthermore, Ransom
considered Tate too glib and saucy in his statement that poets
" erect sound patterns only to break them down again for a greater
ill* is 'on of freedom." And he wondered whether it was wise to
as<: ne that "pure presentation of ideas and sensations" was the
bn< less only of poetry. " But though I have trouble with your
pp . and 3 [he wrote], your p. 2 seems to me as good a thing as
you' v e ever done or anybody else in that field. And I admire many
other bits here and there. But honestly I question if the whole is
worth the immense labor of working it out that falls upon the
reader."
And, in a postscript, Ransom described as a " most nonsensical
differentia" Tate's statement that the theory of correspondence
was "at once the backbone of modern poetic diction and the
character which distinguishes it from both the English tradition
and free verse." It struck him, Ransom said, " as something fierce."
Ransom's concern, however, pleased Tate, for he wrote David-
10 Lines three and four of the poem are: "Trembling was at her lips, and
her petulant eyelids / Drooped, proclaiming him victor in that campaign."
"April 15, 1924.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 155
son a few days later: " Received a fine letter from John, threshing
me soundly for the late and lamented editorial." 18 To Ransom,
however, Tatc wrote challenging the statement that his article was
not worth the difficulty it took to decipher it, and Ransom modified
his charge in a letter written a week after the first one: "I par-
ticularly deplore my having raised the question whether it was
worth the reader's time to work out your system: that, I suppose,
was one of the overstatements which are pedagogically sound
(receiving their justification from Plato himself) but damnable
between friends. The difficulty of making you out was extreme:
that was about all I had a right to say."
He modestly pleaded " plain ignorance" about the French
poetic theory that Tate charged him with misrepresenting and
ended: " I believe it is a fact that you are the only available victim
for me, when it comes to giving my aesthetic theories an airing;
and it is possible (though I do not wish to flatter myself) that I
am one of the most accessible responses you yourself can find when
you are similarly engaged." 19
When it became evident to Tate that he had removed from
Nashville permanently, he resigned from his position as associate
editor of the magazine, to be replaced by Jesse Wills. Tate's policies
had diverged so radically from those of the other members that he
wondered if the Fugitives would not be better off without him
even as a member; accordingly, he asked Davidson to " sound out "
the sentiments of Ransom and Curry about his withdrawing. 20
Davidson replied that Tate's leaving the group was not to be
considered; no one was hostile to Tate, he insisted. 21 The constant
disagreement and ill feelings among the Fugitives stemmed from
the numerous small annoyances connected with the publication
of the magazine, particularly now, with the question of the Back
contract. This was not merely Davidson's private interpretation.
At a meeting near the beginning of April, a resolution was pre-
18 April 21, 1924.
19 To Tate, April 22, [1924].
"April 16, 1924.
11 To Tate, April 25, 1924.
156 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
scnted which mentioned the waning Fugitive enthusiasm, Back's
loss of about $450, and the paucity of current subscriptions (144).
It was the opinion of the committee that " The Fugitive, founded
as the poetry organ of a small group committed to a rigid applica-
tion of an uncompromising poetic doctrine, has definitely alienated
a large body of potential readers and subscribers . . . ." 22 There-
fore, the committee recommended that, after two more numbers
of the magazine, publication of The Fugitive be discontinued at
the end of the calendar year.
But the controversy could not be resolved. Warren's letters
to Tate at this period reveal the spirit of pessimism that had over-
taken the Fugitive meetings, where evenings were " taken up by
the usual fruitless discussion and wrangling as to how the magazine
[was] to be continued and how this, that, and the other thing
[were] to be done." M Warren reported that several of the members
were in favor of abrogating the contract with Back at the end of
its first year (in August) and continuing the magazine through the
December issue on the group's own responsibility:
That would release Mr. Back from his somewhat unprofitable obli-
gation during the summer and make the Fugitive members themselves
underwriters for the next two issues which would complete the year.
Mr. Frank opposes and is willing to make no change of contract if the
magazine is to continue at all; he is, however, in favor of assisting Mr.
Back financially without making any alteration of the legal terms. John
and Jesse seem to hold with him after his presentation of the matter
Frank was afraid that, inasmuch as the members were partners, not
a corporation, Back would have a legal claim on each of them if the
contract were broken. Hence, he felt that midsummer discontinu-
ance of the contract was " an unsound business step." 2B As a result,
the motion was passed that Frank inform Back of the impending
88 " Report of Committee on Disposition of the Fugitive," April 7, 1924.
' [Early spring, 1924].
14 [Early spring, 1924].
815 As quoted by Davidson to Tate, April 25, 1924.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 157
termination of the contract at the end of the year and of the inten-
tion of the group to help financially with the last two issues.
The next day Johnson (who had not been at the meeting) met
Ransom and Davidson to discuss the future of the magazine.
Ransom and Davidson saw the abandonment of The Fugitive at
the end of the year as an almost certain event and were willing to
pay with the other members whatever sums were necessary to
maintain some self-respect in finishing the year. Johnson was full
of new schemes, one of which concerned the formation of a stock
company, with other literary men such as Harry Alan Potamkin
and Joseph Shipley. He felt that the way The Fugitive had been
run was the cause of the disruption: a minority view had no chance
under the strong domination of Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and
other partisans of modernism.
Wrangling was so chronic with the Fugitives at this stage that
Davidson, sick at heart, himself considered resigning. He wrote
Tate, " So long as high spirit was uniform, so long as the enterprise
possessed nobility, it was truly a happy labor." 26 Their roles were
reversed; and Tate was equal to the task of reassuring one who had
often counselled him. He replied that he would never consent
to Davidson's resigning: "You are the pivot of our activities; you
mustn't unseat us suddenly. But I repeat that you have every
justification for doing so." 27
Meetings were being continued, in spite of the lack of an
inner core of agreement between members. On the evening of
April 21, Jesse Wills read what Ransom called "by long odds the
best poem of considerable length (150 lines) that a Fugitive has
yet perpetrated." Tate's sonnet "was read, admired, and con-
demned in the most standard manner." 28 The group had always
charged Tate with affectation in his poetry; speculating on this criti-
cism, Tate wrote ruefully to Davidson : " It is depressing to reflect
that the only real piece of affectation I've committed, the only
emotional tour de force is the very poem that was cherished best
" April 25, 1924.
a7 To Davidson, April 26, 1924.
" Ransom to Tate. Anril 22. 1024.
158 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
by the group" A Scholar to his Lady." I am simply posing; but
'mob' sentiment, cliche emotion, never seems affected; it seems
sincere because ' everybody ' feels that way/' 29 On the same day
Tate sent Hirsch, as president of the Fugitives, an ironic letter
which took the guise of a long personal complaint against the
group, making satiric use of the various disgruntled attitudes of
different members. He was well aware that several of the poets
felt the managing of the magazine had been unfair; that its policies
tended to support only a certain kind of poetry and so favored
Ransom, Davidson, and Tate; and that this larger issue, masked
by the financial problem, was the really troublous one confronting
the Fugitives. Despite the group's apparent misinterpretation of
the letter, the resulting controversy led to a clearing of the atmos-
phere. Ransom described to Tate the fruits of the discussion:
I wish you could have listened in on our meeting of last evening.
In the first place, you would have been able to renew your slipping
confidence that you had cast in your lot among friends. I believe a
letter is in process of getting itself written to express to you more
formally the sense of the group as deeply appreciative of your labors
and loyalty on behalf of the common cause . . . which have never
seemed to waver despite the fact that you so obviously were in the
position of an extremely attenuated minority. We all, as a matter of
fact, despite the naturally tyrannous tendencies of any overwhelming
majority, feel thoroughly disposed to render you full credit for the value
of your services and to give you the most ample representation in any
exhibit of the work of the group. Of course in the long run, there is no
estimating the value of any highly differentiated departure on the part
of an individual who knows which of the individual men may ulti-
mately become the cornerstone of the edifice? Caution at least would
prompt us against any exclusions.
Except in the case of the peculiar individualities of Messcrs Frank
and Hirsch. And you would have been amused and edified to note how,
in the course of a long and rather quiet discussion of the verities of
group procedure, last night, we frankly took the position that the dear
"April 26, 1924.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 159
magazine was open to any sort of performance that could style itself
Modern ....
But best of all, Ransom continued, the boys were showing a reluc-
tance to give up the magazine: " More and more, at each meeting,
there develops a great disinclination to abandon The Fugitive. We
are now committed to finishing the year on the present basis, with
Back as goat; and with the expectation of going on ourselves indefi-
nitely, the ways and means to be later determined. So I really
believe there's life in the old carcass yet."
The argument with Tate over the idiom of poetry still plagued
Ransom; he pointed out in this same letter that Tate had named
three differentiae as defining the twentieth-century model which
he advocated: the formal, the philosophical, and the rhetorical,
whereas Ransom's own article had dealt almost wholly with the
formal aspect of poetry:
Personally, my own disquietude is wholly over the formal difficul-
ties; I would take it for granted that the other differentiae will attend
any good performance, whatever the form may be; so it has been in the
past. The traditional poets generally have defined themselves sharply
but under a common conception of form; but it is this form that is
broken down now .... An art defines itself as an adventure in a
given form.
Lately, however, he felt that his own formal difficulty had " some-
what receded." His recent poems, in reverse order as nearly as he
could remember, were " Miss Euphemia," " Tom, Tom, the Piper's
Son," "Ada Ruel," "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," "Pro-
metheus," and " Captain Carpenter." Tate had condemned two
poems Ransom had sent him earlier for criticism: " Religio Medici
Kentuckiensis," which Ransom agreed was worthless (" I have con-
signed it to oblivion," he wrote), and "Ada Ruel," (which had in
the meantime appeared in the magazine) about which he replied:
"... I don't believe I can agree with you entirely; I have kept it,
with some change of title. I wonder if it can be that it offends you
in some detail or other only? It seems to me quite tolerable stuff,
but not calculated to make the great ones totter on their thrones."
160 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
But whatever compromises he might have to make with Tate's
aesthetic theory, Ransom was certain that his objection to the
younger man's prose style was valid:
I do feel entitled to impeach your treatment as exposition. I feel
that you are in contact with red-hot truth, for you continually drop
glowing and impressive sparks whenever you wax critical. But you tend
to rely successively on the sparks, when we want a continuous blaze.
In other words, you get hold of a beautiful intuition and immediately
antagonize your followers by founding a Church thereon; when the
probability is, you have stopped considerably short of the core of truth
and are naming some accidental relation or other as THE FUNDA-
MENTALS. I should think you ought to get your own consent to a
little subordination among your (seemingly) perfectly insubordinate
ideas. It is poetic, Modern, and pluralistic to exalt each in turn to the
pinnacle; but the net result is confusion, which I feel is not really
your purpose in prose, at any rate. Why are you not more provisional,
tentative, qualified, disparaging, as you contemplate the Stream of
your Ideas?
Before he could conclude his letter, however, Ransom felt it neces-
sary, aware of his tendency to seeming coldness, to add a postscript
which would make entirely clear the Fugitives' warmth of feeling
toward Tate:
As to Monday 's meeting: I find again that my tones seem rather
cold. As a matter of fact, you are persona gratissima in our eyes a
priceless value to a dull and stodgy group. Even in absence you have
inspired us to rededicate ourselves to honest criticism of our weekly
stints: now each reading is followed by criticism from each member in
turn, and the author is at last assured of having reactions to go by. But
once more, we miss you sadly: parliaments are sleepy affairs when they
are suddenly deprived of the obstructions, jibes, and provocations of
their Left. We all hope you can be with us again this summer. 80
This spring, proving so unpromising to several of the other
Fugitives, brought to Davidson a tangible encouragement: his first
volume of poetry, An Outland Piper, 31 which received quite favor-
May 6, 1924.
61 Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 192.4. 161
able reviews. The Nations comment, written by Mark Van Doren,
may be taken as representing the critical consensus:
. . . the first volume of verse by one of a group of young and
original poets who have been making their magazine, The Fugitive, of
Nashville, Tennessee, famous among Americans who look sharply for
good verse. The prevailing tone is satiric a reader thinks of T. S. Eliot,
Maxwell Bodenheim, and occasionally E. A. Robinson but there is
evidence of a lively lyric gift, and on every page there is proof of a
nimble, fearless mind. Mr. Davidson's next volume may well be a little
more unified and much less obscure. 82
Other reviewers emphasized the satiric vein in the poetry and
remarked upon its lack of any distinctively Southern quality. 38 But
no one label could cover the varied styles of the book's four sections.
The first division is dominated by Davidson's tone of lyricism and
made up of such poems as " An Outland Piper/' 34 " Old Harp,"
and " Following the Tiger." The second section of the volume is
an ironic and in some instances heartless commentary on the
tawdriness of the present. In this division is included the " Pan
Series" that Tate had admired-" Corymba," "Dryad," "Twilight
Excursion," and "Naiad." The third division, "Alia Stoccata,"
comprised of such poems as " Pot Macabre," " Iconoclast," " Ec-
clesiasticus I," and " Alia Stoccata," possesses an irreverent pertness
of tone and an engaging liveliness of movement. The least success-
ful piece in this group is " Ecclesiasticus II," a diatribe against
the religion of Americanism. The volume ends with " The Man
Who Would Not Die," a sharp, sardonic yet not cynical handling
of blank verse which seems in Davidson's natural vein. It begins:
The seasons had beleaguered Evan Thane
With many a ravenous yearly trumpeting,
"CXVIII (April 2, 1924), 376.
aa Later on in the year, Untermeyer, writing in The Yale Review (October,
1924, 160-61), did Davidson the justice of reviewing his book with the work
of four other then important poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Louise Bogan,
and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
34 A somewhat curtailed version of " A Demon Brother," published in the
first issue of The Fugitive.
1 62 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Pinched his defenses into crookedness,
And triumphed at the corners of his flesh,
And yet he would not tumble. Beards had wagged
Upon the lurking pestilence of humors
Pent in the damps to gnaw an old man's bones,
But no beards wagged for frosty Evan Thane.
He said he was no rotten Jericho
To shake for village prophets' reputations,
And scorned the bench where others whittled out
Their easy days with amiable discourse
Of usual death, until at last they died.
Grimly he watched them coward it away;
Glowered contempt beneath the funeral cedars
Scarce long enough to hear the falling clods
Rattle the wood, then lashed his horse and fled,
Like one who leaves a shameful battlefield. 35
Twenty-four of the thirty-three poems in An Outland Piper
had already been published in The Fugitive; it is interesting to
observe that the unconvincing note of despair and cynicism in the
volume derives chiefly from the nine added poems (some of them
published in The Double Dealer, Palms, and Fo/io). The Fugitive
group had not endorsed these other poems, and Davidson and Tate
attributed such lack of approval to a blameworthy backwardness.
Yet one of the benefits of a diverse and primarily conservative
group can be seen here: less aware of dominant moods and fashions
than were the two young experimenters, and possessed of an
unspoken mistrust of aestheticism, the other members were able to
discern the lack of genuineness which the disillusioned tone lent
to Davidson's lyric and affirmative expression. Unfortunately, per-
haps mistrusting this same lyricism, Davidson omitted from the
volume three fine pieces" Litany," " Swinging Bridge," and " To
One Who Could Not Understand "all published previously in
the magazine.
As soon as Tate received a copy of Davidson's new volume, he
wrote:
' An Outland Piper, 77.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 163
It is the occasion for a renewed consciousness of the meaning of
our compact, that covenant which was more significant than either of
us could guess on the day of its almost casual making. For my part,
its significance is quite separate from any idea of the greatness or im-
mortality . . . [we may achieve].
As you say, it is the life of adventure, and I say that the reason
of this is that it is the life of the soul; and it is the life of the soul
despite the incidental frustrations we meet and the merely human
foibles we display and the temporary misunderstandings of the flesh
that we may suffer . . . . 8fl
At the time, Davidson's volume received little notice in the South,
where it might have been expected to arouse interest. Concern-
ing this apathy on the part of his countrymen, Tate wrote: " It's
just like the damn Southerners. No wonder we all get disgusted
and want to leave. Some of us can't leave, though, which if it
isn't a victory for them certainly is a kind of defeat for us ... ." ST
But Tate was on the verge of making his escape from a section
which, as he later described it, " knew its own mind, knew what
kind of society it wanted" and which would not support such
" desperate men " as literary artists, " who mean business." 38 Hart
Crane and Malcolm Cowley were urging Tate to come to New
York, but he was afraid he lacked sufficient funds to embark yet
upon a literary career. Another reason for not going to New York
permanently just then was Warren's illness; aware of the younger
man's spiritual isolation, of his need for affection and encourage-
ment, Tate planned to spend the summer with him at Warren's
home in Kentucky. Warren had arranged for a job for Tate in
Guthrie, but since it would not be available until the end of June,
Tate resolved to visit his mother in Washington, next make a brief
trip to New York, and then come back through Nashville to
Guthrie.
14 To Davidson, March 24, 1924.
87 To Davidson, May 7, 1924.
""The Profession of Letters in the South/' The Virginia Quarterly
Review, XI, No. 2 (April, 1935), 164, 172.
164 The Fugitive Group: A Liter ary History
As the Fugitives' vacation plans were being made, the early
summer issue of the magazine went to press. It contained the third
of the series of critical articles, "Certain Fallacies in Modern
Poetry," which sets forth Davidson's convictions that reasoning
about poetry does not necessarily produce it. " Systematic discussion
of poetical theory, however stimulating it may be to the ego of the
poets who engage in it," he wrote, " serves mainly to send thought
rocketing and bounding down narrow channels from where there
is little escape, and to which there is apparently no end. Poets need
above all things to be perfectly unsystematic."
As a focus for his theory Davidson selected five "fallacies"
which seemed to him connected with the false premise that a poet
needs a program, the first fallacy being the idea that "a good
poet must be possessed of an aesthetic." An aesthetic philosophy
must of necessity be after the fact, Davidson pointed out; poetry
must be produced first. Concerning the second fallacy, "that a
good poet must perforce have ' local color/ " Davidson remarked,
"Place is incidental; it may even form a definite limitation, and
perhaps does in the case of much American poetry .... The
poem, not the * scene ' or the business of interpreting the * scene '
must be uppermost in his consciousness." The whole group agreed
with him on this point, as it did in proscribing the third fallacy,
that poetry must possess a special vocabulary. But the fourth
fallacy, " that the grand style is impossible to modern poetry," was
an issue Davidson had frequently argued with Ransom and Tate.
"The grand style is not, after all, a question of technique," he
declared. " The grand style can be written only by grand men."
The " apparent daring " of the proponents of modernism was not
daring at all, he believed, but conformity to a set of inelastic dogma.
The fifth fallacy Davidson listed encompasses the others: ". . . that
any very specific limitations can be set for poetry." Throughout
history, he maintained, poetry had accomplished the destruction
of rules.
Davidson's pronouncements show him here, as always, striking
out against the self-consciousness forced upon the poet in a world
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 165
that increasingly analyzes and categorizes acts of the mind. Even
though he was trying the experimental techniques in his own verse,
he was protesting in his essay the strictures placed upon poetry by
the modern experimentalists.
In the poetry of the same issue is to be found an expression of
the aesthetic view opposed by Davidson in his article. Tate's
"Credo," subtitled "An Aesthetic," depicts the plight of the
modern poet who, faced with the "heterogeneities" of his age,
cannot approach his subject with any degree of innocence or
wholeheartedness :
I can't revise my manners but I think
If the decorative jet, which is your eye,
And the restless pearl, which is your either breast,
Would slough their antic imagery and shrink
To impartial clay, like the dead fantasy
Of tree tops, I could be shriven as the rest.
Good manners, Madam, are had these days not
For your asking nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be's.
The day is a loud grenade that bursts a smile
Of comic weeds in my fragile lily plot;
Comic or not, heterogeneities
Divert my proud flesh to indecisive guile.
Breast, eye: pearl, jet. Madam, have pity,
Consider the precarious poetry of my Race-
How, strictly, even Vittoria piqued the Angel
By that much beauty he inserted in her face;
(Wherefore synthetic wrath may breathe a city
Upon any dim and doubtful perhaps Hell).
My manner is the footnote to your immoral
Beauty, that leads me with a magic hair
Up the slick highway of a vanishing hill
To Words that palace of beryl and coral ....
Often however I hear the music where
Your sudden face rumors of twilight spill.
Here the Petrarchan imagery becomes in the protagonist's eyes the
symbol for all inherited and meaningless conventions. If his lady's
1 66 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
body could slough off its connotations of " antic imagery," con-
nected as they arc with the artificial attitudes of the past, if it could
become natural in the way that " impartial clay " is natural, to be
treated solely as part of the physical universe, then perhaps he
could love her or write a poem with some sincerity. But since her
body does have these associations, and since she herself has vague
notions and expectations inherited automatically and unthinkingly
from the conventions of courtly love, the young man is hard put to
satisfy his mistress. For good manners are difficult these days, not
to be had " for your asking, nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be's ";
they are impossible in a day where the awareness of the twitchings
of one's own mental workings provide a sense of the comic. That
" fragile lily plot," the delicate and retiring sensibility, cannot be
maintained in the onslaught of " comic weeds."
The poet implores the woman he is addressing to " have pity "
to accept his manners both in love- and poetry-making, since the
" precarious poetry " of his race must be considered. Even Michel-
angelo, he says, must have been made unquiet by whatever in-
sincerity he used in his sonnets to Vittoria. And since, as he says,
synthetic emotions can create a Hell even if we lack belief in one,
the state of poetry is indeed precarious: if the conventional good
manners are to be required of it, the price in falsehood is far too
great. The young man makes no grandiose claims for himself: his
style is merely the " footnote " to his lady's " immoral " beauty,
which leads him "with a magic hair" (cf. Pope's "And beauty
draws us with a single hair ") " Up the slick highway of a vanish-
ing hill / To Words that palace of beryl and coral . . . ." The one
realm of concern, then, for the modern poet is words, not beauty or
love or his own emotions.
Warren's poetry in the issue, too, shows a complication in
language as well as a change in direction: "Death Mask of a
Young Man " is far less reminiscent of Eliot and the French Sym-
bolists than his previous poetry has been :
Down the stair had creaked the doctor's feet
Shuffling. He heard them out thinking it queer
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 167
Tomorrow night at nine he would not hear
Feet shuffling out and down into the street
Past the one murky gas jet in the hall,
Past the discarded chair beside his door,
The Steinbachs' entrance on the lower floor,
And the cracked patch of plaster on the wall.
Just how that crack came he could never think
To save his life, though he remembered yet
How once a mouse ran in, quick as a wink.
It must have said, " Why here's a hole in the wall!
I'll just whisk in, into the dark, and let
Heavy and terrible feet tramp down the hall."
This piece makes use of a direct, natural idiom (some influence of
Merrill Moore is apparent) which seems as yet not quite sure of
its own intentions but which indicates, at any rate, a gain in
genuineness. Jesse Wills's long poem " Eden," too, has a colloquial-
ness of tone like Moore's. This is the piece that the group had
liked exceedingly (Ransom had called it the best poem of consider-
able length yet executed by a member); though it is impressive,
however, a sameness of pace throughout somewhat mars it.
Another poem in the issue, Ransom's " Blue Girls " is interest-
ing as an early and less effective version of the later much-altered
poem:
If I were younger, travelling the bright sward
Under the towers of your seminary
I should get a look, and a thought, or even a word;
But I am old, and of aspect too contrary
For you who arc less weary.
For why do you bind white fillets about your tresses
And weave such stately rhythms where you go?
Why do you whirl so lovingly your blue dresses,
Like haughty bluebirds chattering in the snow
Of what they cannot know?
Practice your beauty, blue girls, if you will;
The lean preceptress, she of history,
Showed you the manifold of good and ill,
1 68 The Fugitive Group. A Literary History
And all you saw was princes crooking the knee
To beauteous majesty.
Do you think there are thrones enough, one for each queen?
Some thrones are chairs, some three-legged milking stools,
Or you even sit in ashes where thrones should have been;
And it is for this, God help us all for fools,
You practice in the schools.
Practice your beauty, blue girls, nevertheless;
Once the preceptress, learned bitter one,
Printed the sward in a flounce of purple dress
And was a princess pacing as to her throne;
But now you see she is none.
Though they are perhaps somewhat rough technically, these
lines are written with an absolute certainty of poetic attitude.
But Ransom was beginning to turn his mind more seriously to
criticism: "for a while I don't expect to write further poetry very
systematically, but to refine my critical views and work toward a
prose volume," he wrote Mims. 89
Despite the great strides being made by the four most serious
Fugitives, William Elliott, at the University of California, had
heard rumors of the lack of unity among his poet friends: " So the
Fugitives are awearying. Well, that was to be expected, in due
course, when some of the brethren got too good for the reward
of seeing themselves in print. I haven't had a copy in some time.
Are we defunct? " As far as he was concerned, Elliott admitted,
they had been defunct for a good while. He had finally been made
to realize that his poetry was worthless, he said, that the Fugitives
might have meant " no more than a kindly sociability " in includ-
ing him among them. But he still could not give up writing verse,
and he wondered about his motives:
Is this business of versifying attributable in such as me to mere
vainglory? Clearly the Fugitives have profited by their collective flight
but even for them, is there any possibility of cracking a chunk of
marble large enough, of shaping a statue good enough, of leaving a
"July 6 [1924].
-fello* hair.
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eed texin
At th tMll hour., the c*ig horar*
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in
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th
hur
of th
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f -
tut U'k ile '^*>r* Shiva
till the
And Shlw tareathee -M^I clay.
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fallitriUo.
Zt la put noon. Sh doa,
With toilf draviv^ia toi^ a,
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And ether euoh verl doe
Robin (HlUvnnt
Typescript of Davidson's 4t Corymba," containing critical comments by
Tate, with replies by Davidson. This interchange is indicative of the
close attention each gave to the other's work.
fat
l+ <&*~ljL4^
<7
Tate's manuscript of " Nuptials."
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 169
thing well enough done to make the leaving worthwhile? .... Even
Sidney has not been able to blow the fires of poetic madness into flame
and you get more and more devilishly sane till presently you will all be
writing sly commentaries on Reason only slightly Impure. The times
are out of joint for such rationalists as me, alack! We are Fugitives to
Poetry to get into a realm where reason is not admitted to court and
modern poetry says there is none. Needless to say, this is all very
unjust to you, one and all all the more unjust to you, D. Donald, who
boil and bubble and burn with the ignis poeticus.
Elliott apologized for his bitterness, but even so, his objections
to the poetry written by his friends remained. If poetry partook
of the nature of a divine madness, why could not poets be content
with a wisdom so far superior to the intellect? To him, as to most
unpledged poets, the value of poetry lay not in its knowledge
through realized form but in its emotion. Elliott never quite saw
that perhaps the most important principle in the unstated aesthetic
theory of his compeers was the refusal to separate intellect and
feeling: to them, poetry had to attempt to say something not merely
inspiring but truthful.
Nevertheless, in spite of his perplexity at the brothers, he would
have liked to have been back with them, taking part in their
truculently frank argument:
How Td like to be one of you again! Next summer I hope to be,
to hear Johnny's irresistible marshalling of argument, to see him grin-
to watch the fiery Tate and the smoothly-sailing Mr. Moore (Oh per-
fection of a young man perfect, all too perfect), to row with my com-
peer in sentimentality Alec Brock (the Lord preserve him from ad-
mitting it), and to stand metaphysically dumfounded by the mysteries
of Mttron (Lord, but how I miss them in this land of outlines!). Enfin,
to Stanley, and to you, I should render special obeisance. You've got
the stuff what more need I?
But the circle that Elliott visualized was an ideal one, with
all the members present at one time an actuality that was be-
coming increasingly rare. Ridley Wills had left Nashville for New
40 To Davidson, June 9, 1924.
170 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
York and the newspaper business after he received his B. A. degree
the previous June; and, although he was never a very serious par-
ticipant, the liveliness of the group had diminished somewhat with
his loss. Tate had been absent all spring, and henceforward, after
this summer, he would be separated from the Fugitives. During
the coming year Johnson was to withdraw from the group and
from Vanderbilt; Warren, too, was facing his final year of activity
with the Fugitive brotherhood. So this summer was to be the last
in which most of the members were fairly close together geo-
graphically. Ransom, teaching at Peabody College across the street,
was present for meetings, as were Davidson, Stevenson, Hirsch,
Frank, Curry, Moore, and Jesse Wills. And, for a few sessions,
Tate and Warren came to Nashville from Guthrie.
Earlier in the summer, Tate had gone on to New York for his
two weeks' visit without coming by Nashville, much to Davidson's
disappointment. " I'm turribly afraid you'll get to New York and
find it difficult to tear yourself away," 41 Davidson wrote propheti-
cally. In his metropolitan surroundings, Tate was impressed with
Hart Crane, who treated him " royally." He was kept busy meeting
the city's literati (and found them much less " theory-ridden " than
the Fugitives). Gorham Munson spoke well of Davidson, Ransom,
and Tate and was extremely interested in Warren, according to
Tatc's first enthusiastic letter back to Nashville. 42 In his next
report Tate elaborated on Davidson's reputation in the New York
literary world: nearly everyone he met knew and liked Davidson's
work, although they all maintained that he lacked "a structural
sense." Tate was constantly surprised in his dealings with these
people, however, to find them "far less conscious of being poets
than we are as a group." 4S
But by the end of June Tate was back in the South, spending
pleasant hours with Warren riding horseback, swimming, and
walking. They slept late in the mornings and basked in the after-
noon sun, and Tate wrote Davidson that "Red" was looking
41 To Tate, June 4, 1924.
48 To Davidson [Early in June], 1924.
41 To Davidson, June 15, 1924.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 171
healthier than he had ever seen him. 44 Visiting Warren's family
was the reviewer who had written the Chattanooga News article on
the Fugitives, Caroline Gordon, whom Tate was to marry a few
months later in New York. Warren invited Davidson to spend
some time with him and Tate: ". . . we three might do nothing
together with some degree of satisfaction/' he wrote. 45
But Davidson's duties in Nashville prohibited his getting away
except for a brief weekend. The book-page was going well, though,
like The Fugitive, it consumed a great deal of time. It was main-
taining an unflagging high standard of literary criticism; Davidson,
Ransom, and Tate (much of his work unsigned because of its
frequency) contributed to nearly every issue, and Warren, Steven-
son, Wills, and Frierson appeared often in its columns. Notice was
being attracted by the page in other parts of the country. Among
the comments about it were H. A. Potamkin's statement, " It sounds
fresh, much more so than anything in this burg [Philadelphia],"
and Joseph T. Shipley's avowal that its reviews equalled " those of
any similar page in the great metropolis." 4B On seeing these compli-
ments, Tate had written: " Begorra! If Shipley isn't right! It is a
damn good page. I don't often speak of it, but I'm continually
admiring this added fine feather in your cap." 47
Davidson had sent Tate some of Laura Riding Gottschalk's
poetry for comment, and Tate, although he admired her poetry
immensely, felt that in it much brilliant satire was " embedded in
a regrettable incoherency . . . ." He cautioned Davidson to send
back her poetry with tact because of her "extreme sensitiveness
to rejection." 18 And he thought perhaps the Fugitives had come
to expect of her work such excellence that they often refused her
poems when they would have taken them from anyone else. Mrs.
Gottschalk had gone to New York for the summer, where she was
attempting to find work; but she maintained a steady stream of
* [June, 1924!.
B July u, 1924.
9 The Nashville Tennessean Book Review and Literary Page, May 25, 1924.
7 To Davidson, June 2, 1924.
8 To Davidson, August 6, 1924.
172 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
poems to the Fugitive offices. About this time she initiated another
flow of contributions to the editors, of a different sort: the names
and addresses of acquaintances that might be likely prospects as
subscribers to the magazine. These were sent in with frank ap-
praisals of financial statuses, habits, and idiosyncrasies. By fall,
when she would return to Louisville, it would be with the decision
to work perseveringly for the perpetuation of The Fiigitive.
The summer's work meant much to Warren. For one thing, he
was trying to catch up with back assignments, left over from the
spring quarter's work. Of a thirty-page paper he wrote for Mims on
the subject of his religious convictions, he commented to Davidson,
" You ought to see my hair-splitting. I feel like a sort of Thomas
Aquinas." 40 For Ransom's course he was working on a paper deal-
ing with Conrad. But these troublesome academic tasks failed to
keep him from the writing of poetry. In May he had had two
poems accepted by Voices, and during the early part of the
summer The Double Dealer accepted his trilogy " Portrait of Three
Ladies. ' To Davidson he sent " Young Men in April Dusk " and
" Admonition to the Dead," asking for " merciless criticism." B0
When Davidson returned them with comments, evidently finding
some serious flaws in the first and praising the second, Warren
promised to rework " Young Men in April Dusk." 51 He sent
the Fugitive selection committee four poems, three of which were
printed in the August issue.
This late summer number of the magazine omitted the critical
essay that had been promised with each issue. " All theories perish
when exposed to the torrid circumstances of mid-summer in a
Southern city," the editorial apologized. " Cerebration ceases, or
becomes agglutinated." But poetry somehow continued, and for
evidence the editors pointed to the contents of the journal, though
perhaps only one poem in it is up to the group's best standards:
49 August 30, 1924.
80 [June, 1924]-
51 [Later in June, 1924]. Both poems were published in the October issue
of The Double Dealer (VI, No. 39, 2), the title of the first changed to
" Autumn Twilight Piece."
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 173
Ransom's "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son," an allegorization of a
basic theme in Ransom's poetry the discrepancy between man's
and the universe's evaluation of himself. Yet if the other poems
in the issue are not memorable, they are at any rate competent.
At the end of the summer, the "Committee on Ways and
Means " met at Mr. Frank's house to draw up proposals (which the
group adopted in the meeting of September 25) that the October
issue of the magazine be consolidated with the December one;
that the arrangement with Back be terminated at the end of the
year; that an effort be made to secure funds for the following year
from the Associated Retailers, Ward-Belmont College, individuals
friendly to the magazine, and an increased subscription list; and,
finally, that The Fugitive " for next year adopt a quarterly basis of
publication, restrict itself as a policy to the publication of the work
of Fugitives, and simplify its working administration as much as
possible . . . [perhaps by] administration by a committee, possibly
one of changing membership." 52 From Washington, Tate wrote
that he was in hearty agreement with the plan. 58
Thus the fall began with the members free of the responsibility
of an immediate issue, the lull offering them a chance to prepare
for the December issue and the contest awards. Their plans were
to present three prizes for the most distinguished poetry contributed
to the magazine by an outsider during the year, making the de-
cisions themselves instead of referring them to judges unconnected
with the magazine.
Davidson's volume was still receiving critical attention. In the
current Double Dealer, John McClure, writing a long review
of An Outland Piper, stated that he considered the Fugitive " school
of poetry" the most interesting in the South: "They are perhaps
closer to the genuine art of poetry the beautiful music of speech
than any coterie in our [America's] literary history." The Nash-
ville poets were not without their weakness, he admitted; they were
too greatly influenced by Freudian theories and by the " sophisti-
cated irony " of Eliot; they were concerned too much with being
62 Report of the Committee of Ways and Means, Sept. 20, 1924.
68 To Davidson, September 25, 1924.
174 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
brilliant and intellectual; but they were redeemed " by a genuine
passion for the art of literature . . . ."
Davidson he considered " one of the best at his peak probably
the very best "of the Fugitives. An Outland Piper did scant
justice to its author, McClure felt, containing as it did a great
deal of undistinguished poetry and some " positively bad "; never-
theless the good poems in the volume were remarkable: ". . .
work so excellent that it gives 'An Outland Piper* high im-
portance in the year's output of books. Such poetry is not written
by many men. Its author is one of a select few in the United
States. Passages in these poems seem to me to be among the
finest in American verse/' B4 Tate was overjoyed at McClure's
praise of Davidson : " I can't wait a moment [he wrote] to hail you
with congratulations and him, too, for that matter, for having
sense enough to give you your due. It's by all odds the best you've
received, I should think. See what he says about Ye Fugitives!
You bring honor to us all." 55
But another notice of Davidson's book drew Tate's ire. In an
issue of Poetry B0 devoting seven pages to Carl Sandburg and three
pages to Louis Golding, An Outland Piper was relegated to half of
the last page in the magazine. The review, written by Harriet
Monroe herself, ended with a quotation from " Requiescat," per-
haps the weakest poem in the book. Tate was certain that the Fugi-
tive quarrel of the previous summer with Miss Monroe had occa-
sioned the summary dismissal of Davidson's poetry; indignant, he
composed a letter of protest, sending a copy to Davidson along with
an explanatory note. 07 The letter was printed in the December
Poetry under the heading " A Polite Protest." 58 As was customary
with him, Tate was in this instance direct and purposely bellicose.
Stating that he had felt for some time a " growing inadequacy " in
Poetry, both in its " outmoded editorial policy " and in the quality
84 VI, No. 37-38 (August-September, 1924), 209-210.
68 To Davidson, October 3, 1924.
" XXIV, No. VI (September, 1924), 344-
"October 5, 1924.
68 XXV (December, 1924), 169-170.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 175
of its verses, he accused Miss Monroe of one of three things: (i)
personal prejudice, (2) " utter anesthesia in the field of aesthetic
values/' or (3) careless reading. Charging that she had quoted
the worst lines from Davidson's volume as representative of him,
Tate went on to say: " I do not maintain that Davidson's work is
perfection. It is, however, more than often distinguished." He
came to the point of his accusation when he expressed the opinion
that Miss Monroe's slur upon Davidson was the result of David-
son's attack on her the year before in The Fugitive. Tate obviously
expected an indignant reply; but "Aunt Harriet's" answer was
calm and unargumentative: she merely stated that she had never
seen the "attack" in The Fugitive, having been abroad in the
summer of 1923; that she had not known or had forgotten that
Davidson was editor of that journal; that her review was intended
to be favorable. Not rating Davidson so high as Mr. Tate did, she
had quoted from what she considered his best.
There was nothing for Tate to do but let her have the last word
in public. But Davidson and Tate both resented her condescending
attitude toward The Fugitive; and Tate, at least, felt reasonably
certain still that her poor review of Davidson's poetry stemmed
from her disapproval of the work of the Fugitives and her sponsor-
ship of a Southern poetry in line with her own ideas of what
Southern poetry should be.
Ransom's second volume of poetry, Chills and Fever, appeared
late in August. 59 Davidson gave the book immediate attention
in his book page, writing a long and carefully detailed essay which
made clear that he considered Ransom the foremost poet in the
South and one of the " very few really significant and altogether
original literary figures in the entire country." The philosophy
of the poems could be seen to be, Davidson wrote, ". . . not a
growth of disillusionment or a maze of abstraction; it is the expres-
sion of a personal attitude toward the world, evident throughout
his poetry generous and inclusive acceptance of life for what it is,
humility in the face of perplexing issues; a serious wish, essentially
M New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924.
176 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
religious, to find truth; the creed of a fine-spirited gentleman,
sensitive to physical and spiritual wonders." co
A few months later Tate took up the volume in The Guardian,
setting forth his thesis that Ransom's poems were essentially "in
the Classical tradition." Like T. E. Hulme, Tate saw the chief
characteristic of classical art as "the repudiation of a rhetorical
Infinite in which the megalomania of man rhetorically participates."
Ransom was actually more like H. D. or Catullus than like Donne,
Tate maintained, in spite of superficial resemblances to the meta-
physical poet. Yet " certain impurities " marred Ransom's otherwise
distinguished work in the present volume: the encumbrance of " an
outworn and, for his purposes, irrelevant Romantic tradition " had
kept Ransom from achieving, according to Tate, " the precision that
would make his classical spirit aesthetically significant." 61
Other reviewers, writing over a period of more than a year,
uniformly found Chills and Fever an important and flavorful
volume, Louis Untermeyer and Christopher Morley in particular
praising the book. To William Alexander Percy it was a surprise
that a man brought up in the South could write such poems as
"Agitato ma non troppo" or "Philomela"; forced to admire
Ransom " unsympathetically, even grudgingly," he nevertheless
expressed respect for the whole group of Fugitives. 62 John Mc-
Clure, too, gave respectful notice to the whole group of Nashville
poets as he reviewed Chills and Fever:
The cynical and intellectual elements in the Fugitive school of
poetry have come to flower in John Crowe Ransom's Chills and Fever,
which is unquestionably (with H. D.'s Heliodora') one of the finest
books of poetry published in America in the last year .... Mr. Ransom
has developed the intellectually expressive cadence to a point probably
not excelled by any American not even by Eliot, Pound, or Stevens, and
*The Nashville Tennessean, August 31, 1924.
61 "In the Classical Tradition," The Guardian, I, No. i (November, 1924),
25. In his next review of Ransom's poetry, three years later (" The Eighteenth-
Century South/' loc. cit.), which Ransom would call " the most inward examina-
tion " his poetry had ever received (Ransom to Tate, February 20, 1927), Tate
was to perceive the necessary function of the two strains in Ransom's work.
"The Double Dealer, VII (January, 1925), 114.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 177
certainly not by Frost and he charges many of his cruel lines with an
ideal and formal beauty of rhythm. It is possible that Donald Davidson
if he fulfills his early promise, will do pure rhythms better than Mr.
Ransom, and it is possible that Allen Tate will some day merge the
cynical and formal elements of Fugitive verse as well. But in actual
account, Mr. Ransom is the dean of the school which has made Nash-
ville, Tenn., famous. 63
Ransom took his place, McClure stated, with Eliot, Stevens, and
Pound as a "distinctive and notable figure in contemporary
literature."
Chills and Fever is a finished volume, expressing a clarified and
consistent attitude. Thirty-six of the forty-nine poems making up
its contents had first appeared in The Fugitive. That Ransom used
The Fugitive as a medium for experimentation less than did the
other members is evidenced by his inclusion in the volume of all
but four of his poems published in the magazine up to this time.
The thirteen others in Chills and Fever had appeared in The
Literary Review, The Bowling Green of the New York Evening
Post, The Chaffing Dish of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, The
Sewanee Review, and The Double Dealer, one of them, "Arma-
geddon/' had appeared in a separate biblio published by the Poetry
Society of South Carolina. Of these latter poems not previously
published in The Fugitiveonly " Winter Remembered," " Here
Lies a Lady," " Miriam Tazewell," and " Annageddon " are among
Ransom's most distinguished work.
In a quite real sense, then, the volume may be taken as a sum-
mation of Ransom's early Fugitive career, representing the years in
which he wrote his best poetry. He was turning now more to
prose, almost as though he had learned everything he could through
poetry. And indeed, although the poems are by no means repeti-
tious, they do reveal that Ransom had by this time perfected the
poetic form to express his fundamental theme. This theme is the
result of his honest and inclusive view of human existence, an
existence which, as he sees it, has posed the same problems to man
"The New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 22, 1925.
178 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
throughout all periods of time. Being irrevocably dualistic, man
must live through these eternal problems without solving them,
in the sense that a problem in logic may be solved. Unable to react
simply either as body or spirit, he must attach his own evaluation to
objects and events, but without losing sight of their cosmic insig-
nificance. Three years later, in a letter to Tate, Ransom was to
state his poetic intentions in a passage which applies equally well to
Chills and Fever as to the later volume which he was discussing:
"My objects as a poet might be something like the following,
though I won't promise to stick by my analysis: (i) I want to find
the experience that is in the common actuals; (2) I want this
experience to carry (by association, of course) the dearest possible
values to which we have attached ourselves; (3) I want to face the
disintegration or nullification of these values as calmly and reli-
giously as possible/' 6 *
In October, Tate had gone back to New York, where he found
other writers friendly but jobs scarce. A position with the Climax
Publishing Company (a pulp magazine firm) enabled him to earn
a living without entirely preventing his serious literary activity.
He found immediately that he could not endure most of the literary
crowd of the metropolis, however, and decided to limit his review-
ing to The Nation and the Herald Tribune, contemning The
Saturday Review, The Bookman, the Evening Post, and The
American Mercury. 05
Tate did form friendships with people whom he valued, how-
ever, among them Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, Slater Brown,
E. E. Cummings, and Edmund Wilson. He was able now to
share ideas directly with Hart Crane, with whom he had corre-
sponded for two years. Crane showed Tate some new poems which
he called "Voyages," and Tate immediately discerned their im-
portance. The new ideas and theories that Tate was encountering
in his metropolitan surroundings gave him a skeptical attitude
toward his own work in poetry; he lost interest in publishing a
volume, gradually reaching the conviction that he should wait until
64 March, 1927.
" Tate to Davidson, December 8, 1924.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 179
his poems were mature. He was still placing poems occasionally
with various periodicals, but he was " keeping others in the drawer
because [he was] not sure of them." 6fl
The other Fugitive in New York, Ridley Wills, was occupied
with his own literary work. His novel Harvey Landrum 7 appeared
in September with quite favorable notices. Davidson's review
praised it for a sound achievement; it had local color, he felt, that
was not obtrusive. 08 Wills had during the summer given up his
work with the New York Herald to found a newspaper of his own
in Rye, New York the Rye Courier, which became a sprightly little
periodical for sophisticated suburbanites. He wrote to Davidson:
Our aim is to make an international local sheet of it with literary
qualities. Accordingly, I offer you a job, for the glory of it. Will you,
from time to time, send us personal jots of what is going on in Nashville
among worthwhile people. For an example, will you write under the
head of Nashville Personals, that Knopf is bringing out Chills and
Fever by John Crowe Ransom, on September 1 5, and that Mr. Ransom
is working on another volume and has a new baby daughter. Or that
Sidney Hirsch, author of The Rose of Washington Square has written
a dithyrambic cpithalamium to Om's third birthday and is considering
having it published as a footnote to the Koran. You get the idea. 69
Another letter from Wills a few months later is interesting for its
comment on Mims:
I very much enjoyed Dr. Mims' visit here. Let young men with
burdensome minds say what they care to 111 stick up for Dr. Mims.
He's fine and honest and zealous, and is justifying himself in more
ways and to better effect than men less purposeful, less militant, and
more organized. He's a Don Q and he finds many windmills. He
knows they arc windmills and wishes they weren't. And he tilts them at
their own game, but he tilts them, and I am not one to say that they
don't deserve tilting. He's my friend as you are. 70
66 Tate to Davidson, November 16, 1924.
67 New York: Simon and Schuster, 1924,
68 The Nashville Tennessean, November 23, 1924.
August 8, 1924.
70 To Davidson, November 16, 1924.
180 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
But Wills was permanently lost to the Fugitives. His fundamental
lack of seriousness had always kept him from understanding the
intentions and ideals of the group; and now, separated from it by so
great a distance of space and of motive, whatever intimacy he had
ever had with other members gradually dropped away.
One other publication by a Fugitive appeared in this fruitful
autumn, an English edition of Ransom's poetry, Grace after
Meat. 11 Robert Graves had come across a copy of Poems about
God and, hearing that the book had received little attention in
America, determined to sponsor an English publication by its
author. At his solicitation and T. S. Eliot's, the Hogarth Press
undertook the publication of twenty of Ransom's poems which
Graves himself selected from Ransom's repertoire. Nine of the
poems are from Poems about God; ten from the recently issued
Chills and Fever; and one, " Ilex Priscus," is a hitherto unpublished
piece. Graves contributed an introduction which was calculated to
put the American literary public in its place, as the following
passages show:
About two years ago I came across a copy of Ransom's " Poems
About God " which had fallen completely flat in America, largely I
believe because of its title. The literary editors had handed their review
copies to the theological reviewers and the theological reviewers, perhaps
slightly scandalized, at any rate found it a book impossible to praise in
their columns.
Although Christopher Morley spoke a good word for Ransom in
(I think) the New York Evening Post that was all the benediction
" Poems About God " won. I became so interested in the book that I
began to ask whatever authorities on modern American poetry I met
T. S. Eliot, J. Gould Fletcher, Edward O'Brien, Professor Kroll of
Princeton, and others about this most unusual writer. None of them
knew anything about Ransom; Edward O'Brien wrote to his friend
Braithwaite, an assiduous anthologist, but again no news. [Footnote:
More lately I met Mr. Louis Untcrmeyer who knew about Ransom and
seemed to rate his work as highly as I did.] It seemed then that the
71 London: Printed and published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the
Hogarth Press, 1924.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 181
best thing to do was to publish a selection from " Poems About God "
and from Ransom's later work, in England, hoping for the usual reper-
cussion in America. 72
In Graves's critical estimate of Ransom's work he remarked the
similarity of the Southerner's poetry to Frost's. In both poets he
found " an extremely fastidious art disguised by colloquialisms and
a pretence of ' evcry-which-way ' (to borrow Frost's own word)."
Both men, he felt, acted as " spokesmen for those rebellious ' poor
whites ' (in the political and plutocratic sense)" who revolted
against the restricting puritanism of their fathers to adopt a " new
religion of nature worship and toleration of their fellows."
Graves had another opportunity to praise Ransom at the ex-
pense of the South in reviewing Chills and Fever. On this occa-
sion he commented again about the backwardness of Ransom's
environment, indicating that he had heard Nashville was "a
byword in the States for comic provincialism: as here in England
one need only say * Wigan ' and the gallery of any variety theatre
will rock with sophisticated mirth." 7J Ransom's Nashville friends,
who had taken some pains not to be " merely Southern " in their
attitudes, Found themselves nonetheless resenting Graves's deri-
sion. Davidson wrote a polite rebuke in his column, saying that
he saw less resemblance to Frost in Ransom's work than to Edmund
Spenser; 74 and Tate, objecting to the " poor-white " phrase, com-
mented to Davidson, " I daresay John is quite as civilized as
Graves." 7B
By now The Fugitive had made its way into the literary world;
critics and reviewers frequently mentioned it with admiration. But
in spite of its growing prestige, its subscription lists remained small,
and its burden of debt from the preceding year (before Back took
over) was still unpaid. At a meeting in Frank's home on November
5, at which all the Nashville members except Hirsch were present,
" Ibid., 7-8.
78 " Muscular Poetry," The Saturday Review of Literature, I, No. 22 (Decem-
ber 27, 1924), 412.
74 " The Spyglass," the Nashville Tennessean, November 30, 1924.
78 January 7, 1925.
1 82 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
the members discussed the plan for managing the magazine in
1925. They decided by a unanimous vote to require twenty-five
dollars of each Fugitive, "contingent on the pledging of $250
through patrons or by other means"; to launch a subscription
campaign; and to charge one dollar for four issues of the magazine. 7 "
For the administration of the magazine, they decided to elect two
editors to serve for one year Ransom and Warren for 1925 either
of whom, together with a committee of two members, would select
the poems to be used for each issue.
A short while later Ransom and Davidson sent out publicity
material to potential and former subscribers, taking the pains to
pen brief notes on the notices. But no doubt the most active efforts
to publicize the magazine were made by Laura Gottschalk, who
with apparently limitless vitality had adopted The Fugitive cause
as her own. She had been sending in lists of possible prospects;
and now she wrote Davidson asking if she might have the group's
permission to speak of the Fugitives at women's clubs and to enlist
whatever support she could. Davidson sent her a report about the
organization so that she might be able to answer questions accu-
rately; he described the foundation of the magazine, its personnel,
the volumes published by its members and, attempting to define its
literary policy, he wrote:
The Fugitives are not a unit in their literary beliefs and practice.
I believe they represent all varieties of poetical creed and practice, from
the wholly traditional to the more or less radical. Nevertheless we are
prevailingly " modern " in tone, I am sure, occupying perhaps a middle
position between the extreme conservatives and the extreme radicals.
Some critics have professed to find a " Fugitive type," but this is a little
surprising to us, as we differ widely to our own way of thinking. I
believe the magazine will show that we look with a catholic eye on
traditionalism when it is good, or on experimentalism when it is honest.
We are foes to sentimentalism in all forms, whether it be the conven-
tional sob-stuff that used to mark Southern literature, or the more pre-
tentious kind that is peddled out in Harriet Monroe's magazine. Litera-
ture is a serious business to us. We are for no compromise in the arts,
76 Resolution in Fugitive records.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 183
and desire to publish in the magazine only what we consider the best
poetry, without reference (or with as little reference as possible) to the
demands of popular taste. We do not care to appeal to the many, and
do not think we can, but we wish to reach, and are reaching, the
intelligent few everywhere in whom lies the real hope of American
literature.
He indicated the group's growing interest in the serious writers of
its own locale, but stated its intention of publishing chiefly the
work of Fugitives themselves. "Our distribution is remarkable,"
he wrote, " but the number is pitifully small. People don't sub-
scribe to poetry magazines we have found that out." He added,
incidentally, that The Fugitive had few Southern subscribers out-
side of Nashville. As to whether the magazine would continue to
be published, he commented: " Depends altogether on our ability
to raise funds. Our personal resources are very low (too many
profs! and students!). Therefore patrons seem to be the last re-
source. You can mention this if you wish." 77
All during the fall Mrs. Gottschalk directed her zeal in the
magazine's behalf; but in spite of her untiring efforts there is no
evidence of any tangible support which she elicited. Meanwhile,
the others, working again among relatives and friends, secured
sufficient backing by the end of the year to enable publication to
continue. When he heard the good news, Tate, always tremen-
dously attached to The Fugitive even when he quarreled bitterly
with the other Fugitives, wrote Davidson an enthusiastic letter:
" Hurrah for the Fugitive in the past and emphatically for 1925.
I can say, and with much sentiment of which I am so little ashamed
that I am positively proud of it, that although I am swamped in
the maelstrom of literary New York, I feel myself to be a Fugitive,
in our special sense of the term, as I did in the spring of 1922.
I hope, naturally, the emotion is reciprocated." 78
Near the middle of November the group came to a decision
about the contest winners. Laura Riding Gottschalk, the winner
77 Davidson to Laura Gottschalk [undated].
T> December 8, 1924.
184 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
of the Nashville Prize, was clearly "the discovery of the year"
for the Fugitives. When on November 19 the members sent Mrs.
Gottschalk a wire announcing her award, she wrote a letter of
lavish thanks. Four days later she wired that she would be in
Nashville the following week end.
The Fugitives were perhaps rather absurd in their reception
of Mrs. Gottschalk at Nashville. Courteously, yet somewhat form-
ally, they greeted her as a fellow poet rather than as a person.
Most of the members had settled their personal connections on a
satisfactory basis already and were not open to warm, enthusiastic
friendships of the sort that their guest apparently expected. Not
at all unsophisticated, they were nevertheless not bohemian in their
private lives. They were accustomed to having their relationships
with other people grow over a period of years and were totally
unable to pledge a new personal allegiance immediately. But the
Nashville visit was upsetting, for whatever cause. To these serious,
rather courtly gentlemen, it must have seemed somewhat odd to
admit a pert young woman on an equal basis; at any rate, the
meeting took on a self-conscious atmosphere. Mrs. Gottschalk and
Hirsch quarreled, and the whole event ended in confusion.
Nevertheless, in December she wrote Davidson again, sending
more names and the poems she had read at the meeting, Ransom
having asked for the poems to consider them at greater length.
Ransom had also spoken of forwarding some of her work to Robert
Graves, and Mrs. Gottschalk wanted advice about preparing it.
But the young woman was to make only one other visit to Nash-
ville, and, although at that time the members elected her to mem-
bership, hers was to be a very limited sort of association with the
group. She was not really influenced by the Fugitive approach to
poetry; indeed, some of the men were later to feel that, far from
being a disciple, she would have liked to take the Fugitives over
and influence them. Her representation in the December issue was
generous, as it was to be in all the 1925 numbers. Nevertheless,
in her connection with the magazine, she functioned only as con-
tributor, not as a real member.
The Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 185
In the December issue, nineteen poems are by Fugitives, four
by Mrs. Gottschalk, and only five by other outsiders. Tate con-
tributed four poems, one a ballad, " Fair Lady and False Knight,"
another his translation of Baudelaire's " Correspondences," and the
other two a pair of rhymed iambic-pentameter pieces entitled " Art."
These last two poems are addressed to J. E. W. (Jesse Wills) in
whom Tate believed strongly, insisting then and later that his was
perhaps the most natural and powerful talent among the Fugitives.
Wills had already indicated that he did not consider himself a real
poet, but Tate was unable to accept this decision. Hence in these
poems Tate makes a dire prophecy to his friend who has turned
from " lonely beauty in the mind ":
When you are come by ways devoid of light,
Cast to some nether hole of jagged gloom,
Drinking the draught of your definite night,
Thirsting therefrom recall as an heirloom
A dawn when stars dropped gold about your head
And, so amazed, you knew not were you dead.
But aside from the occasion of its composition, it is powerful verse
in mercilessly burnished language.
Jesse Wills's two sonnets in the issue reveal talent and sensi-
tivity to language and to situation but still deny the commitment
of self. In " Premonition " he makes an easy use of landscape to
suggest inevitable disaster: " Could that bright, careless gold / Of
dandelions, those grackles glittering . . . Portend a scoriae desert,
chasms, and cold? " Then, " Earth shook as though it snored /
Troubled by dreams of thunder . . . ." It is an accomplished and
arresting piece. "He had an inexorable logic operating a keen
analytical mind," one of the Fugitives later said of Wills; such a
mind might find a commitment to poetry unseemly. But for what-
ever reason Wills remained, in the succeeding years, the most gifted
of the Fugitives not to publish a volume of verse.*
* After this study was in galley proof, a book of Jesse Wills's verse (Early
and Late: Fugitive Poems and Others*) was issued by the Vanderbilt University
Press.
1 86 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Among the other Fugitives, none gave himself quite so lustily
to poetry as Merrill Moore. It is tempting always to dismiss some
of his verse, streaked as it is with cleverness, as the work of a
superficial writer, but it is a poet of no mean ability who can begin
a sonnet, "I know when no mice rustle in the sheaves /That
Autumn is gone." The four pieces in the issue, although attesting
his fecundity in the poetic image, exhibit some of his tricks as
well, in particular a breathless rove-over from line to line along
with an overuse of and to lend an anacrustic beat to his lines. Out
of the fifty-one lines in the four poems, seventeen begin with and.
Two of the poems are sonnets, the proposition, counter-proposition,
and near-resolution of which Moore found particularly suitable to
his genius; and the other two are isolated descriptive fragments
which, in spite of a regular rhyme-scheme and a cadenced line, art-
fully suggest formlessness. These latter two poems, " Mrs. Claribel
Diggs " and " Ephraim Diggs," concern " abnormal " personalities,
giving evident example of what in general is true of Moore's work,
that his aesthetic is grounded in psychology.
The most important poem of the issue is Davidson's long
" Legend in Bronze," a symbolic account of the rape of beauty by
mechanism. It makes use of what was to the Fugitives at the time
a surprisingly even Spenserian stanza, without the discontinuities
and esoteric vocabulary that, in the twenties, marked a work as
modern. Like many other Fugitive poems, it is an allegory, in this
instance constructed around the humanity of beauty. Steadily the
poem advances from the opening suggestion of terror: "Closing
the door, she first was softly ware / That a lone house at night is
not the same." There are the simple fears: "So many a step to
climb, so many a rail / Winding against her fingers up and on /
Through circling dark that ever seemed to scale / The journey with
her ... ."; the simple bravery: " Only the nameless stir of the
nameless night! / She said, and was ashamed of looking back "; the
simple vanities: "Pausing, she must have known that she was
fair, / The long glass caught the flicker of her smile, / A joyous
thought made flesh, for a little while." Quietly she goes to bed
as she hums an old song, reads an old book. But the monster is at
T/?c Beginnings of Critical Theory: 1924 187
hand, the metal beast whose loud clashings are not recognizable
to the simple perceptions of beauty, wise only to human ways:
She locked the door, for when was beauty proof
Against live flesh when beauty's flesh is lone?
Yet how should iron ever bolt aloof
A brazen tread that she had never known?
The mirthless body creeping cold as stone
With hard metallic pantings on the stair,
Crashing at every move, though she might not hear?
Finally the invasion occurs while the fair victim sleeps, never
knowing, never seeing the despoiler. Davidson has made traditional
use of lyric details, pausing for the implications of horror to intrude
as he advances the action toward its inevitable outcome. Both for
its artistic merit and its thesis, the poem is significant in Davidson's
poetic development.
Ransom contributed two poems, " Day of Judgment " and
" Virga," that are interesting if not first-rate. Warren's two pieces,
"Alf Burt, Tenant Farmer" and "Admonition to Those Who
Mourn/' arc polished, somewhat formal exercises, not bursting with
originality but nonetheless possessing serious intention. And
Stanley Johnson's three poems, " The Grand Wolf," " Argument,"
and " Any Husband to Any Wife," are also well wrought, so that
on the whole the December issue is one of the best numbers of
the magazine. Commenting on it, Tate wrote, " Great stuff! Not
so good an issue in a year." He considered the outsiders, excepting
Laura Gottschalk, " mere fillers," as usual " much inferior to Fugi-
tive material." 70
A paragraph in the editorial announcements was devoted to
Jacques Back. It noted the termination of the Fugitive contract
and bestowed the gratitude of the group the only coin the poets
possessed:
Without his service and generous interest, it is doubtful whether
the magazine could have survived during the past eighteen months.
79 To Davidson, December n, 1924.
1 88 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
We wish to pay our public tribute to a rare spirit whose duties, in the
present unrcmunerative condition of art in the South, often required
as much philanthropy as business energy. When the annals of The
Fugitive are written, let the chronicler pause here, and write Jacques
Back into his record.
Back had never attended a Fugitive meeting; some of the members
had never met him. But he was important to the Fugitives in
the way Destiny is important. Unexpectedly he had offered them
sustenance without patronage. But, just as they had suspected,
poetry could not be made financially profitable. The experience
with Back convinced the group that poetry is a product of personal
sacrifice with a token of support from a few people.
CHAPTER SEVEN
(RRll^
THE END
OF
THE FUGITIVE:
1925
THE SOUTH was prospering: business every-
where was good; and at Vanderbilt, according to The Alumnus,
money had "flowed like a beneficent river " into the endowment
fund. 1 Most Southerners interested in the cultural development of
their section assumed that prosperity would bring with it an in-
creased interest in the arts; and the various literary societies formed
throughout the Southern states were an apparent verification of
this innocent hypothesis. In spite of the preceding year's financial
near-disaster for The Fugitive, there still seemed to the Nashville
poets hope for poetry in the section. Near the beginning of 1925,
this last year of life for The Fugitive, Donald Davidson in his
weekly column spoke of the healthy creative spirit of the day:
" Pessimism is not the proper mood for a critic of this time," he
wrote, " which in the largeness and bouyancy of its spirit begins to
1 The Vanderbilt Alumnus, X, No. 6 (May, 1925), 185.
189
190 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
take on some semblance to the Elizabethan Age. There is a kind
of joy in the air, a zest in creation, an exuberance of production, a
keenness in self-education that promises to make this the great age
of American literature." 2
At the beginning of the year Ransom assumed the position of
editor of The Fugitive. Assisting him was Robert Penn Warren,
who had so far exerted no strong influence on the group because
of his youth and inexperience. Their task was made easier by the
contributions of patrons, so that, before the orange ink struck the
first of the new black covers, the financing for the year was secure.
Thus the Fugitives could relax somewhat their concern for the
management of the publication, to give their attention more com-
pletely to its contents.
The magazine began a series of book reviews in its first issue of
the year, R. P. W. (Warren) reviewing Joseph Auslander's Sunrise
Trumpets. His critical comments show him to be already distrust-
ful of what he was later to call " pure poetry " :
Mr. Auslander is a poet who possesses great sensitivity to the minor
strains of emotional experience, but this very preoccupation, if such it
may be termed, seduces him into poetry that is scarcely important or
memorable except for a certain neatness and glitter of phrase. His
sensitivity often leads him to respond to a poetic stimulus so slender
that when refracted through the medium of his verse it fails to evoke
the appropriate reaction. And this overly facile emotional content lays
him open to the charge of a feminine exaggeration or even insincerity
on the part of readers who perhaps are not so delicately attuned to the
frail modulations of which he treats.
In short, Warren felt, Auslander lacked " cerebration."
J. W. (Jesse Wills) reviewed Roy Campbell's The Flaming
Terrapin in the same issue. But the important critical writing in
the March number was tendered by Ransom in his generative
essay "Mixed Modes." This piece is Ransom's first formal state-
ment of his belief that poetry must ensue from the mature mind,
since it deals with the various and disparate levels of experience
* " The Spyglass," the Nashville Tennessean, February 22, 1925.
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 191
which only a whole mind is capable of penetrating. Ransom made
here his first public condemnation of Plato's sponsorship of the
" pure and simple modes/' a view which led, he feared, to the kind
of juvenile poetry that the nineteenth century produced: Tennyson
and Browning, for instance, had relatively simple minds; Swin-
burne wrote "nonsense melodies," and the Pre-Raphaelites pos-
sessed a " sinister naivet6." Earlier, Byron, Shelley, and Keats never
" became quite sophisticated, or grown-up . . . ." In fact, " nobody
in the whole century knew how to put his whole mind and
experience to work in poetry as had Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
and Milton." A few modern poets, however, Ransom found to be
concerned with expressing their own mature minds and " not the
mind of the hypothetical Wonder-Child "; these poets were doomed
to be tagged "wilful and obscure by a trifling generation." But,
if poetry has any value, Ransom concluded, it accrues from being
the report which poets make of their own " mixed modes."
The poetry of the four chief Fugitives by this time was showing
itself to be the work of mature minds expressing themselves in
" mixed modes," though there was little similarity in the mixtures.
To the March issue Tate contributed only one poem, " Homily,"
but as he wrote to Davidson it is in his " essential style." 3 Its
tight, metaphorical lines exhibit a growing power in the difficult
and oblique idiom Tate was striving to master:
And if your tired unutterable head
Turn too neatly left and right,
Crazed by the warlock of a curse
Dreamed-up in some loquacious bed,
And if this head of yours rehearse
The energies spilled into the night
When you fell down and bruised the stars
With glitter of superior light,
Why, cut it off, stark piece by piece,
And throw the proud cortex away
And when you've marvelled on the wars
'October 3, 1924.
192 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
That wove their smoke its intricate way,
Tear out the tight, vermiculate crease
Where death crawls wearily at bay!
This is the first of Tate's poems in the pages of The Fugitive that
seems completely achieved; its fusion of violent, implicit metaphors
and intricate rhythmic cadence excites an extension of conscious-
ness to a state of spiritual illumination. Earlier in the year The
Nation had printed a poem which was to become part of Tate's
rigorously selected canon, " Advice to a Young Romanticist." * Tate
felt that, at last, his poetic experiments were headed in the right
direction. " In the end it will amount to a complete rehabilitation
of technique," he wrote; " It will consist mostly in establishing a
method of presentation of my own (in other words, a new form),
within the traditional prosodical patterns."
Davidson's poems, "Boundary," "Fear in a Cubicle," and
" Cross Section of a Landscape," represent a departure into a vein
which is, on the one hand, plainer and less lyric and, on the other,
less consciously " modern " and ironic than any he had previously
employed. The last of these exhibits the protest against materialism
which is one of Davidson's chief themes, but here the approach
is philosophic and rational rather than lyric and emotional. The
scientific attempt to explain the universe in terms of a substantial
substratum is carried to an analogical conclusion:
Here is the ice that girdles joyless ocean;
Water girdling a sphere of quiet slime;
Under it rock that has no life or motion
Save from the twirl, the eternal pantomine.
Under the rock is fire that dies by inches
Over a slag and ash of old decay.
Finally, what? The mathematician pinches
Space to a point in his ponderable way.
But when I was a boy I searched from pole to pole
Of a gaudy globe, a rainbow-colored ball,
Peeled the cover, unraveled the shiny whole,
And was vexed to find at center nothing at all.
4 CXX (January 14, 1925), 45-
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 193
Ransom published in the issue two of his most often antholo-
gized poems, " Piazza Piece " and " Eclogue/' both of which are
surely and elegantly handled. Warren's " Iron Beach," a revised
version of an earlier Fugitive poem, and " The Mirror " both deal
elcgiacally with the theme of mortality. "Iron Beach" in par-
ticular the group had liked when it was first read at a meeting and,
later, when it was revised. Its fiercely ambivalent diction makes
it one of Warren's finest early poems.
Stanley Johnson was not represented in the issue; in fact, he
was never again to contribute to The Fugitive. Unable longer to
stand what he considered hypocrisy in university life, he had re-
signed at Vanderbilt late in December. His novel, Professor, was
due from the press in two months; and, like most books satirizing
the academic profession, it had made use of various traits of actual
people in its none-too-savory portraiture. The stir at Vanderbilt
heralding its appearance had led Johnson to take a long-contem-
plated action to seek his fortune through writing. By the end of
January he had gone to New York and looked up Allen Tate. The
two decided to find quarters together and subsequently were estab-
lished at 50 Morton Street, in Greenwich Village. Tate wrote that
he looked forward to " much work and many good times " 6 with
Johnson, and later, concerning the forthcoming novel, he com-
mented to Davidson, " Your obvious excitement before the appear-
ance of Stanley's book misses me to a great extent . . . ." 6 A Yale
professor could find himself in the book, Tate believed, as easily
as could a Vanderbilt faculty member. But when Professor 7 ap-
peared in Nashville bookstores, townspeople looked for and were
certain they found satiric portraits of various Vanderbilt men.
Reviews of the book were brief. And, indeed, Johnson's novel
is a great deal less than a masterpiece, its chief flaw lying in an
excessive concern with superficialities. It fails to establish a com-
pelling form capable of subordinating its personalities to the moral
urgency behind the theme. The novel is not poorly written so
5 To Davidson, January 26, 1925.
' February 2, 1925.
7 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925).
194 The fugitive Group: A Literary History
much as it is ineffectual; the author's lack of sufficient aesthetic
distance, although understandable, is crippling. As a record of
Vanderbilt life, of the English department, of the founding of
The Fugitive, and of the lives of individual Fugitives, however,
Professor is not wholly unreliable. Precisely because the subject
matter has not been perfectly transformed into fiction, there exists
in the novel much that may be taken straightforwardly as John-
son's actual views.
Professor centers around the activities of Dr. J. Tanksley Park-
hurst, a Chaucerian scholar and head of the department of English
at an imaginary Thurston College in a small New England town.
Dr. Parkhurst is a man with an assumed fagade of dignity through
which may be glimpsed a naive vanity and an ineptitude not
wholly pleasant. In a word, Parkhurst is a hypocrite, mouthing
phrases about literature that he does not feel, pretending to a rich
amorous background that he does not possess, bullying men who
are his inferiors in rank but by far his betters in character and
comprehension. The section of the book most noteworthy is the
part depicting the efforts of Dr. Parkhurst's downtrodden staff to
establish a poetry journal. Elmo Davis no doubt modelled on
Ransom is the oldest staff member, whose poetry, as the result
of combining a " grim vocabulary with classic meters," has acquired
a " satisfactory reputation." Davis broaches the matter of a maga-
zine to Dr. Parkhurst: "A group of us ... have been meeting
together for some time to talk philosophy and read poetry and have
a sort of literary improvement meeting. The other night it was
suggested we publish a magazine like ' Voices ' or ' The Fugitive '
or perhaps like ' The Reviewer/ and we've been wondering what
you would think of it." Dr. Parkhurst is dubious: "I wouldn't
want my name attached to anything of a doubtful nature," he
replies.
But the author's sympathies are not entirely with the young
instructors struggling with their poetry journal. He constructs a
telling parody of the general Fugitive style (or at least of Ransom's
and Tate's). Dr. Parkhurst, in looking over the first issue of " The
Little Magazine " with Davis, calls attention to a poem which he
considers " about the worst modernistic drivel " he ever read:
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 195
EBULLIENT BEAN
A. Rauwolf , the cautery viands thought, no doubt-
Recalling dusky sisters' calorification in mere sunlight
And browned men in uniform needing a stomach clout-
Were vain, O Maracaibo, for his giant Cenobite.
Aurora on a gaunt shore wrought no more miracle;
Hunyadi Janos would have envied Boswell
The trachea's sylphic and modern caracole.
Indeed, thy aroma perfumed Europe's morsel.
In Minnesota, too, stimulation takes a rise
Where, clouting down, Gorsta Rudbak, the Finn,
Her fists clubbing at sleep-blistered eyes,
Puts the kettle on and learns to make it thin.
Embarrassingly enough, the poem turns out to be Davis's own,
written under the pseudonym of " Oliver Twist." Parkhurst apolo-
gizes, explains that it is not like the poetry to which he is accus-
tomed, and asks Davis to explicate the piece. The far-fetched inter-
pretation is a burlesque of the methods of the Fugitives in analyzing
poetry the close textual reading that led into the " new " critical
writing:
" Well, Doctor, you see, it's like this "began Davis, " the other
morning mother and I were having our coffee and the thought occurred
to me that millions of people all over the world were having coffee at
about the same time a tremendous influence coffee and somehow the
notion grew that it deserved a poem as a crystallization of the idea.
" Of course I wanted the reactions of a sophisticated person, a new,
fresh, unusual approach to coffee in modern poetry you have to avoid
the obvious as you would the devil. So I decided to trace the psychology
of a sophisticated mind, the thoughts any gentleman might have upon
drinking a cup of coffee.
"A. Rauwolf, you will remember, was the man who introduced
coffee into Europe " (Davis had discovered A. Rauwolf under " coffee "
in Webster's Unabridged).
Parkhurst nodded. "Yes, I recall."
" Well, A. Rauwolf in eating his breakfast, or meat (the ' cautery
viands ' of the poem), no doubt recalled the coffee beans he had seen
196 The Fugitive Group: A Literary Histor)
in the hot tropical countries where he had traveled; the ' dusky sisters '
are, of course, the heans heated (' calorification ') in the sun. At the
same time he would naturally think of the great need of coffee in
Europe, as for example among the soldiers C Browned men in uniform
needing a stomach clout ') Now, let's go back. A. Rauwolf, then,
thought breakfast were vain without coffee (the ' O Maracaibo ' is a
little conceit, I admit) were vain for his own giant organism, or body
or, in a sense, Cenobite."
The rest of the poem is elucidated with the same dexterity, the
subtleties of Davis's reasoning reducing Parkhurst to a state of
confusion.
After Tate had read the book, he agreed with Davidson that
the artistic worth of Professor was not great: " Stanley's book-
though I can't agree with you fully was rather a disappointment to
me. I suspect Stanley's mind has yet to reach its maturity; its
values are too much preoccupied with the incidentals in his subject
matter; in short, it lacks the ' high seriousness ' which, in various
forms, exists in the writing of Sterne as well as in Wordsworth.
But I think he will do better next time." 8
Tate was still engaged in writing reviews and occasional articles
and, at this particular time, in the publication of Aesthete: 192.5,
which was, as he explained, an attempt to continue the sort of
experimental work that had been done in Broom. 9 Tate had been
publishing his poems during the preceding year in several other
magazines as well as in The Fugitive: The Double Dealer, The
Guardian, The Lyric, The Reviewer, SiN, and Voices; and in
1925 his best poems were to go outside The Fugitive. Both "Mr.
Pope" and "Death of Little Boys," for instance, were to appear
elsewhere in print in 1925. For whatever reason, whether injury
on Tate's part or lack of perception on the group's, when Tate's
real mastery of poetry occurred, it was not in the pages of the
magazine he had helped found. Yet all the while he had been
sending poems to be read at Fugitive meetings and receiving them
'To Davidson, May 21, 1925.
Tate to Davidson, January 21, 1925.
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 197
back with pencilled suggestions in the margins; and in return the
group consistently forwarded for his criticism the poems read at
the fortnightly gatherings.
But the constant friction over the small and niggling matters
of policy was wearing to Tate, who, engaged in his own battle in
the literary capital, was anxious not to give his sanction to methods
and products of which he did not approve. His distance from the
Nashville friends kept him nervous and touchy; and a sense of
personal injustice at the hands of some members of the group led
finally to his definite and sober resignation mailed to the Fugitives
in February. " I feel I am doing myself an injustice by appearing
nominally as a member of the group," he wrote. " It isn't that I
wish to remove my name from an organization I simply disagree
with; it is rather that I can't make my disagreement felt either to
a successful or an unsuccessful issue at this distance." 10 Ransom
replied to Tatc, suggesting that he consider being inactive rather
than disconnected and assuring him that his views were recognized
and respected in the group. Tate agreed to the softening of the
severance and described his feelings to Davidson : " I didn't expect
anyone to submit to my views; I only wanted them recognized.
They have been recognized in an excellent way." lx In the June
issue, accordingly, announcement was made of the inactive status of
Tate and also of William Elliott, who likewise had asked to be
removed from the masthead.
No doubt one reason for Tate's willingness to withdraw officially
from the magazine was his growing conviction that, since The
fugitive had performed its function of allowing new creative talents
to develop, it should consider its work accomplished:
I think the Fiigitive, if the sentiment involved through several years
of organized work be put aside, should have suspended a few months
ago or should suspend pretty soon in the near future. The work of
such a magazine must be limited in time; for it set out to introduce a
group of new poets and, that done, it has no more to say. At the same
10 To Davidson, February 9, 1925.
"May 21, 1925.
198 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
time, I can understand the natural emotions at the prospect of giving
it up; there may he a variety of motives, in the variety of persons in
the group, making for continuance, but I can't see how those motives
at this date can be strictly critical in their desires. The trouble with
Monroe's Poetry, and Voices, and The Measure is that their good work
originally is being discounted by the mistake of lifeless perpetuity. 12
And, indeed, one is forced to admit that by now most of the
magazine's work was done: the individual Fugitives at this point
had not only decided upon the courses they must pursue, but had
become caught up and involved in responsibilities issuing from
their diverging commitments. Ransom, at thirty-seven, having
gained some recognition as an accomplished poet, was writing essays
for periodicals and planning a book of prose; Davidson, nearly
thirty-two, with one volume of poetry behind him, was engaged in
the critical activity required by his book page; Tate, twenty-five,
in his literary experimentation in New York, was extending and
deepening his artistic convictions; Warren, at twenty, had just
graduated from Vanderbilt. and, certain that his path led to writing
as a career, was contemplating graduate study for the forthcoming
year. These four, dedicated to the art of literature, had performed
an act of faith in adopting for their means of livelihood the pro-
fession of letters. Curry, engaged in completing his Chaucer
volume, was pledged to the scholarly profession; his research in
the esoteric aspects of great literature of the past would cause him
finally to view the writing of his own age with distrust. Jesse Wills
and Alec Stevenson, two whom the group considered poets of real
consequence, had by now decided against their own importance in
poetry. They would continue writing, but at their leisure and as
gentlemen amateurs. Stanley Johnson had gone the way of Ridley
Wills into journalism, where cleverness and enterprise rather than
cerebration or sensibility are the necessary tools. James Frank and
Sidney Hirsch had been outwardly unaffected by The Fugitive's
career. It had provided an engrossing activity around which to
center many profitable hours of conversation; but for both men the
"Tate to Davidson, May 5, 1925.
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 199
cultivated companionship of the group was more important than
the solitary and earnest business of composition. Only Merrill
Moore seemed able to pursue the double program of writing poetry
assiduously and at the same time following another vocation. In
his first year of training at the Vanderbilt Medical School, he was
nonetheless able to write sheaves of poetry and to approach his
writing as a real medium of expression.
Criticism was now the chief realm in which The Fugitive could
offer a medium for experiment, and accordingly the June issue con-
tained two reviews by Davidson and an editorial by Ransom. David-
son had ordered Eliot's Homage to John Dryden from England and
devoted to it several seriously conceived paragraphs, in which he
pointed out a basic agreement between Eliot and the Fugitives.
Modern poets, Davidson stated, were discarding the nineteenth
century, but they were not turning away entirely from the English
tradition the Elizabethans, John Dryden, and the eighteenth cen-
tury, for instance. Consequently, Eliot's three essays discussing
Dryden, the Metaphysical poets, and Andrew Marvell were doubly
significant: they contained a new evaluation of poets with whom
most readers were insufficiently acquainted, and they afforded an
understanding of certain basic qualities in modern poetry. These
now-familiar essays with their dicta concerning wit, the fusion of
thought and feeling, and the modern necessity for difficult poetry,
must have seemed to Davidson an uncanny coincidence with the
major premises of Fugitive poetry. " A better apologia for a great
part of modern poetry/' he wrote, " especially a character of poetry
in which The Fugitive has been interested, could hardly be devised.
One might say that in this time it is more difficult to be simple
than it is to be difficult: and that most kinds of simplicity are
likely to fall under the accusation of dishonesty on the one hand
and lack of a necessary diversity of equipment on the other."
Ransom's editorial, " Thoughts on the Poetic Discontent," en-
larged upon the principle that he first set down in his "Mixed
Modes." In this second essay a revolutionary document which
became the cornerstone for modern Southern literary criticism-
Ransom delineated more clearly the character of the mixture:
200 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
" Irony may be regarded as the ultimate mode of the great minds-
it presupposes the others." Ransom traced the course likely to be
followed by a maturing mind in its attainment of the ultimate
mode. In the first place, man is by nature dualistic, his very coming
into the world creating an awareness of the chasm which separates
himself from the universe the spirit within from the material world
without. He seeks to bridge the chasm, to " effect an escape from
dualism," by erecting philosophical and metaphysical systems which
encompass the observable world. In effect, he erects a "mystical
community " so that he may " escape from an isolation which he
cannot endure." He ascribes to the objects of experience the
spiritual qualities which properly belong within himself. Thus,
Ransom declared, the pathetic fallacies of the romantic poets stem
from this desire to establish a mutuality of feeling between man
and the cosmic order. In the light of man's scientific observations,
however, this romantic construction cannot always stand; conse-
quently, Ransom continued, the poet accepts a dualism again, but
it is not like his original, naive position. " For too much history
has intervened, he is a dualist with a difference reluctant, specu-
lative, sophisticated rather than ingenuous, and richer by all the
pathetic fallacies he has ever entertained."
That most of the nineteenth-century poetry was written in the
second, or romantic stage Ransom made clear. But the " earlier and
greater poets (Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton)
along with or following their own share of lovely romantic adven-
tures, turned back to the stubborn fact of dualism with a mellow
wisdom which we may call irony." Irony, then, contains a rejection
of the romantic solution; ". . . but this rejection is so unwilling, and
in its statements there lingers so much of the music and color and
romantic mystery . . . and this statement is attended by such a
disarming rueful comic sense of the poet's own betrayal, that the
fruit of it is wisdom and not bitterness, poetry and not prose, health
and not suicide. Irony is the rarest of the states of mind, because
it is the most inclusive; the whole mind has been active in arriving
at it, both creation and criticism, both poetry and science." " The
most inclusive "this phrase was to influence strongly Ransom's
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 201
most able students and disciples: among them besides Tate and
Warren Clcanth Brooks, Andrew Lytle, and Randall Jarrell. In
fact, this phrase could be taken as a key to the attitude behind
the whole modern Southern school of writing. Among the Vander-
bilt group Davidson alone was struggling to reclaim a poetic tradi-
tion less guarded than the seventeenth-century one from which this
style derives.
No poems better illustrate the " inclusive " attitude than Ran-
som's own in the same issue with his article: "The Miller's
Daughter/' " Jack's Letter," and " Semi-Centennial," the first two
dealing with the ironic impossibility of romantic love; the third,
depicting the "intellectual condition." In this latter poem, an
old man, exiled from the physical world for fifty years, comes
out to view the spring, which turns out to be less exciting to him
than the "music and histories" which have made up his interior
life. He knows himself a god because of his ability to design large
schemes, though he recognizes his lack of power to execute them.
Nature will not obey him, in his "poverty and disrepute/' Yet,
as he points out,
" The better part of godhead is design.
This is not theirs only, for I know mine,
And I project such worlds as need not yield
To this commanded April on the field.
" And it is ample. For it satisfies
My royal blood even thus to exercise
The ancestral arts of my theogony.
I am a god, though none attend to me."
And he watched, with large head resting in the sun,
The gods at play, and did not envy one.
He had the magic too, and knew his power,
But was too tired to work it at that hour.
Composed just before the Vanderbilt Semi-Centennial celebration,
the poem can be read as delineating the powerless yet withal
superior position of the university in relation to the actual world,
of the world of thought in relation to the world of action. The
202 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
old man's is the philosophical position Ransom condemned in his
first volume, particularly in " The Swimmer," and it is the position
shown throughout his poems to be fatally wrong, though eternally
desirable.
Davidson's three poems in the issue mark a continuation of
elements which were visible in his work in the preceding number.
" Not Long Green " is constructed in a plain but heavily freighted
idiom:
For a heavy long time on the long green bough
Hangs the apple of a summer that is shaken
From its flat hot road to its apple-topped hill
With the scraping of a mole that would awaken ....
He is under the turf of the long green meadow,
Snuffling under grass and lusty clover
With a sure blunt snout and capable paws
Up the long green slope past the beeches and the haws
For the summer must be shaken and over.
Here Davidson's true poetic voice emerges, undistorted by attitudes
foreign to his own talent. It is the essentially straightforward and
impersonal nature of his lines that places them in sharp contrast to
Ransom's sophisticated declamations, in which a speaker is always
implicit if not openly portrayed. The grimness in the double
meaning of such phrases as " long green " is a different quality from
Ransom's irony or, for that matter, Tate's wit.
Six sonnets by Merrill Moore found room in the issue, all of
about the same quality provocative, enjoyable, impertinent but
lacking sufficient profundity to render them significant. Jesse Wills,
too, contributed a sonnet, " Red Even," another of his disciplined
pieces showing the ineffectuality of the modern panorama of
gadgetry to avoid disaster and doom.
Laura Riding Gottschalk's two poems in the issue demonstrate
her limits: " Druida," a piece of great imaginative powers fails be-
cause of formlessness: there is in it no formalizing principle pre-
venting its incoherence. By contrast, her other poem, "The Cir-
cus," possesses a stark allegorical power which is almost sufficient to
fuse the work into an organic entity:
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 203
The trained men tumble hereditarily.
The ringmaster has lost his way.
Back to the music, the band being
Not the same choir simple
Of primate tunes, as in the old days,
But a careful dissonance
Drowning elaborately the lost theme.
In this world of isolation, where " the universality is preserved ,
By the private ignorance of each ring in the tent," only two beings
"disturb the gigantic self-possession." One is a tiger, beautiful,
scornful, and hopeless;
The other, the poor poet and crier,
Renounces a prominent place in the accurate frenzy
And, perceiving a clenched philosophy
In the lean jaws,
Throws himself bit by bit
In rhythmic meat
To the starved yellow beast.
But the outstanding piece in the June fugitive is Warren's " To
a Face in the Crowd." This poem conveys the sharp awareness of
the common loss suffered by men who must now view each other
externally and momentarily as faces in a crowd:
My brother, brother, whither do you pass,
Unto what hill at dawn, unto what glen
Where among rocks the faint lascivious grass
Fingers in lust the arrogant bones of men?
Beside what bitter waters will you go
Where the lean gulls of your heart along the shore
Rehearse to the cliffs the rhetoric of their woe?
In dreams perhaps I have seen your face before.
A certain night has borne both you and me;
We are the children of an ancient band
Broken between the mountains and the sea.
A cromlech marks for you that ultimate strand
And dolorous you must find the place they stood.
204 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
Of old I know that shore, that dim terrain,
And know how black and turbulent the blood
Will beat through iron chambers of the brain
When at your back the taciturn tall stone,
Which is your fathers' monument and mark,
Repeats the waves' implacable monotone,
Ascends the night and propagates the dark.
Men there have lived who wrestled with the ocean;
I was afraid the polyp was their shroud.
I was afraid. That shore of your decision
Awaits beyond this street where in the crowd
Your face is blown, an apparition, past.
Renounce the night as I and we must meet
As weary nomads in this desert at last,
Borne in the lost procession of these feet.
One of the most skilfully handled elements in the technical strategy
here is the juxtaposition of words with incongruous associations-
most often a latinatc and affective adjective with a concrete, Anglo-
Saxon noun, as in " lascivious grass," " arrogant bones," and " taci-
turn tall stone." Sometimes the reverse is effected, the concretizing
of an abstraction, such as " ascends the night and propagates the
dark" and "shore of your decision." The associations set up by
such contrasts give an energy and a brilliance that would be lacking
in a more ordinary diction. This poem represents in quite tangible
form the fruit of the Fugitive movement. Something of Ransom,
Tate, and Davidson and a little of Stevenson, Johnson, and Moore
have gone into the making of this poem, though this is not in the
least to say that it is not in Warren's own voice.
Tatc's respect for the work of his friends remained high. In
contrast to the leading literary men in New York, many of whom
were, he felt, petty and pretentious, his Nashville friends were
always serious and unfraudulent. The June issue Tate found par-
ticularly commendable; Ransom's and Davidson's critical ideas
expressed therein stirred him to an enunciation of his agreement.
Tate was aware that his two oldest and best friends were still the
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 205
men in contemporary American letters whom he most respected:
" It docs seem after all in spite of dissension among ourselves that
you, John, and I have been looking toward the same conception
of modern poetry," he wrote Davidson; " and Eliot in England is
with us." 13
The idea that emotion alone is the property of poetry had been
demonstrated as false, Tate continued, the ignoring of the intel-
lectual, and therefore critical, side of the mind having permitted
the issuance into poetry of not only genuine emotions, but also
" faked " ones. In his opinion, the modern poet therefore had the
great difficulty of removing from himself all the spurious emotions
with which he had been surrounded; and, even greater, he must
". . . in the lack of a criticism to prepare his audience do his own
pioneeringhe must not only make, he must sell his article, which
is nearly impossible. If Eliot had cared to explain the reason why
modern poetry is difficult (it isnt intrinsically) he would doubtless
have written something like the above: an audience with one set of
emotions, the poets, in advance, with another set, and this means
nothing else than a currency of two different languages. What do
you think of the idea? " The two Fugitive articles Tate considered
'' the most important critical writing in months," and he was pleased
and excited to find in them corroboration of his own ideas. " I
believe you owe me a letter," he continued, " but I'm so full of this
idea this morning and so pleased to see other Fugitives in my way
of thinking, I couldn't resist writing."
The three friends were still exchanging poems in their letters
and, in spite of their differing aesthetic theories, were finding them-
selves in an ever growing closeness of accord. Of some of David-
son's critical remarks, Tate commented:
But besides your comment on my work, this letter contains some
of the most lucid and penetrating remarks on poetry in general I have
ever got from you. They easily go to show that we are rapidly approach-
ing a common ground of principles, of which the fundamental one is
that poetry must be the expression of a whole mind not gurgles and
"June 23, 1925.
206 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
spasms and ecstasies over every wayside hawthorne bush; in other words,
it is not, as you say, a report of sensation, it is a resolution of sensation
through all the faculties of the mind. Poetry to me is successive in-
stances of the whole rhythm of thought, and that includes reason,
emotion, extralogical experience, or as I put it a year or so ago, the
entire phantasy of sensation. 14
To Ransom Tatc sent three of Crane's poems for The Fugitive,
asking him to read them over several times before deciding about
them. The poems were " Paraphrase," " Legend/' and " Lachrymae
Christi," all pieces which Tate admired greatly. Of " Paraphrase "
he wrote, "This is one of the most intense poems on death I've
ever seen. You'll notice there's no exposition of " sentiment "; the
poem bursts right out of consciousness as a direct intuition of the
imagined experience." 1G
Crane and the newly married Tates were in close conjunction
during this period, working, reading, and talking together, their
conversation dealing with, among other aesthetic matters, the
problem of the poet's relationship to society, which in turn hinged
on the problem of the structure of social values. The other Fugi-
tive poets were also thrust into a consideration of traditional values
by the loud and sensational publicity given to the Evolution Trial
in Dayton. The Anti-Evolution Bill, or " Monkey Law," passed by
the state legislature on March 13, 1925, and signed by Governor
Austin Peay on March 18, prohibited the teaching of Darwin's
Theory of Evolution in all state-supported universities, normals,
and public schools in Tennessee. John T. Scopes, a high school
science teacher, undertook to test the law by precipitating a trial.
Vanderbilt was untouched by the statute; but its progressive and
liberal leaders saw in the fight against Fundamentalism an oppor-
tunity to deal a sturdy blow against superstition and ignorance.
" We shall build more laboratories," the Chancellor announced.
The Vanderbilt staff was in general unconcerned about the
trial, deeming it not worth serious notice. A few men like Professor
14 To Davidson, July 25, 1925.
15 Quoted in ibid.
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 207
Sanborn realized that the issue was not so simple as it seemed, that,
actually, the evolutionary theory was not taught in public schools or
state universities by instructors sufficiently well educated to per-
ceive its tentative hypothetical nature. Sanborn also recognized
the growing disequilibrium in the modern educational curriculum:
the student was not taught a coherent philosophical view of life;
consequently he did not comprehend the relation of science to
religion, of politics to ethics, of morals to metaphysics. He was
increasingly under the tutelage of social scientists who interpreted
man in terms of his physical nature. If moral values therefore were
to be made subject to the evolutionary naturalism of Darwin, a loss
of any traditional moral code would necessarily occur.
As the trial progressed, with its consequent world-wide pub-
licity, private groups around the university engaged in serious
colloquy. And soon those on the side of religion, even if it bore
no relation to the fundamentalism that reigned over Dayton, found
themselves uneasy in the face of an enlightenment which permitted
so little of the supernatural to remain, so little even of the tcxtural,
the unique, the marvelous to stand. Obviously, those in favor of
the New South movement saw the Scopes Trial as a backward
step in a territory which had been making great strides forward.
Mims, for instance, in an article in the September, 1925, World's
Work lamented the fact that intellectual and cultural standards in
the South had not kept pace with material development. Industrial
progress would do slight good, he maintained, if it were to be used
only to ballast a bigotry and prejudice that was growing worse
instead of better. He listed the refusal of the Southern Methodist
church to federate with the Northern church and the passage of
the Anti-Evolution Bill as two incidents which militated against the
good opinion of the South in the minds of educated observers. But
Mims's contention was that the South was not so bad as it seemed;
it was gradually developing an enlightened minority. " The chief
trouble," he wrote, " is that the South still has a great mass of un-
educated people sensitive, passionate, prejudiced and another
mass of the half-educated, who have very little intellectual curi-
osity or independence of judgment." But, he continued, industrial
208 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
progress had brought with it an increasing number of broad-
minded men, and the young generation was "freer of traditions
and prejudices." Another fifty years would see "great changes,"
he predicted. 16
If the Fugitives were not precisely free of tradition, they cer-
tainly considered themselves free of prejudices. It would be at
least a year after the Evolution Trial before they could affirm the
worth not only of the tradition, but even of the "sensitive, pas-
sionate, prejudiced" Southerners. The savage and misinformed
journalistic attacks upon the South were certainly one of the de-
cisive elements in the later transformed and clarified thinking of
Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren. As in all cultural crises,
the turmoil issuing from the trial brought into the foreground
ideas and attitudes that, taken for granted in the past, were no
longer generally accepted. It was with these basic tendencies in
their society that the four chief Fugitives would be occupied during
the coming year; but the greater part of the work had already been
done in the medium of poetry, which allows little importance to
the superficial and accidental in a writer's surroundings.
Yet at this point both Tatc and Davidson were still denying,
in their published essays, any deep and pervasive connection be-
tween the poet and his native tradition. In a graceful essay, " Last
Days of a Charming Lady," in the October 28 Nation, Tate set
forth his ambivalent attitude toward the land of his birth. That
the charming lady, Southern literature, was now to be found in
Nashville or Charleston he did not deny; nevertheless, her existence
was ephemeral: " Her conversation will be deft and serious but not
too serious, because it will be cast in a whimsicality of fortitude
before the intimate rumor of raped magnificence: It is certain to
be an elegy on the perished amenities of the Old South, done much
after the manner in which Mr. T. S. Eliot a few years ago lamented
the decay of all modern culture. It is a scattering tradition, and its
last living authority will scarcely survive the present decade." l7
16 " Why the South Is Anti-Evolution," L, No. 5, p. 548-52.
"CXXI, No. 3147, p. 485-
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 209
According to Tate, Southern culture had never been very hardy;
the product of a " charmed idleness," it evinced " charm without
energy/' consisting basically " in a reflowering of eighteenth-century
English manners and in the backwash, sterilized, of liberal thought
from that century." For the South was committed to one idea-
preserving its economic order and so could not afford a critical
look at itself. As a society, it was essentially irreligious, being " an
aristocracy of social privilege founded in a rigid social order." Reft
of that order, the Old South degenerated into " a sentiment sus-
ceptible of no precise definition."
Because the section had never viewed its limitations honestly,
Tate continued, American literature had suffered. Yet, strangely
enough, the lack of a real Southern literary tradition afforded the
serious writer in the South more freedom than his other country-
men had:
His mind is open for experiment in form, for curiosity about world
literature.
The modern Southerner does not inherit, nor is he likely to have,
a native culture compounded of the strength and subtlety of his New
England contemporary's. But he may be capable, through an empiricism
which is his only alternative to intellectual suicide, of a cosmopolitan
culture to which his contemporary in the East is emotionally barred.
Exile from the backward and narrow South, Tate concluded, was
the only course open to the Southern artist.
Davidson made no such sweeping condemnation of the section.
In a review of Ransom's Grace after Meat he was concerned only
with refuting the false relation that Graves had established be-
tween Ransom's environment and his poetry:
The error Mr. Graves has made ... is that he has sought to derive
John Crowe Ransom from an environment without any accurate knowl-
edge as to what that environment is. The volume Poems About
God is a dramatic collation of the varieties of aspect in which the
divinity makes his appearance to men; and though the book happens to
be rich in " local color," Mr. Graves is not altogether right in identifying
the poet's sentiments with those of his characters. Furthermore, to
210 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
those who know Mr. Ransom, it is a bit absurd to think of him as
" acting spokesman for rebellious ' poor whites ' " in any sort of sense,
or as doing the interpreter stunt for Tennessee as the other poets he
names have done it for their sections. 18
In fact, to Davidson, " local color " was so little present in the poetry
of Mr. Ransom and his compeers, the Fugitives, as to seem hardly
worth mentioning. No doubt Graves had been honestly attempting
by his remarks to gain for Ransom the prestige he deserved, David-
son admitted, but neither Graves nor any other critic had come to
terms with Ransom's work, which was " ' pure poetry ' in the
sense that environment and immediate experience bear only the
merest incidental relation to it. . . ."
Davidson perhaps overstated his case here, since for some time
Ransom had been making use of specifically Southern subjects in
his poetry as allegorizations, it is true. But earlier than the other
two, Ransom had in his poetry come to terms with his own relation-
ship to the South. He had depicted it in parabolic form in " Old
Mansion/' published in April of the preceding year in The Fugi-
tive. In this poem the old house by which the speaker passes,
"exhaling his foreign weed," is one "whose annals in no wise
could be brief / Nor ignoble . . . ." But the mansion is in a state
of decay, and the "frightened heart" declares:
" Your mansion, long and richly inhabited,
Its exits and entrances suiting the children of men,
Will not forever be thus, O man, exhibited,
And one had best hurry to enter it, if one can."
The speaker raps at the door, but is rebuffed. " The old mistress
is ill," comes the message; so the intruder must leave.
But on retreating I saw myself in the token
I low lovingly from my foreign weed the feather curled
On the languid air; and I went with courage shaken
To dip, alas, into some unseemlier world.
18 "An English Introduction," The Guardian, II, No. 3 (October, 1925),
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 211
And a year earlier, in " Blackberry Winter," Ransom had displayed
his tender awareness that the lady is ill, that her world must be
allowed to perish: "If the lady hath any loveliness, let it die,"
the poem begins.
But still would I sing to my maidenly apple-tree,
Before she has borne me a single apple of red;
The pictures of silver and apples of gold are dead;
But one more apple ripeneth yet maybe.
Later, in an article on Southern literature, Ransom was to write of
an old dying apple tree whose apples grew ever sweeter as the
tree itself neared death. " Are the works of art like those apples,
reaching their best when the society behind them is under sen-
tence of death? " 19 he asked. Loving his society, then, not in re-
bellion against it, Ransom nevertheless seemed to have little hope
for its survival.
In critical writing, too, it was Ransom who gave indication of
the poet's reliance upon his historical tradition, and this in the fall
issue of The Fugitive, in a review of Graves's new book, Poetic
Unreason. Graves's contention was that the values of poetry are
not absolute, but relative. With this sentiment Ransom found
himself in agreement. Poetry intends to evoke a profound earlier
experience, he pointed out; it has had this function for the poet and
is intended to have it for the reader. The two evocations are
necessarily different, however: " A poem records, for all its shining
look of innocence, an intricate historical experience; but it can only
hope to be intelligible to those minds whose history is tangled in
just the same way as the poet's." Further, if a poet were writing for
the widest possible audience, he would simplify and generalize his
expression. How, then, would Ransom judge good poetry? To this
question he gave what he denominated a "pragmatic" answer:
" Good poetry is that which fits our own passionate history, and
expresses that which needs expression from our private deeps." Bad
poetry is the converse. In forming critical judgments, he reiterated,
19 " Modern with the Southern Accent," The Virginia Quarterly Review,
XI (April, 1935), 186.
The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
these are the only "principles" which we may allow ourselves.
" On this catholic platform honest poets should unite; but to dog-
matize our own poetic likings into a standard for others is to sub-
tract fatally from the conception of poetry as a spontaneous and
expressive art." And yet what about a universal standard for
poetry? Ransom's answer to this worrisome question seems admir-
ably ambiguous: " Poetry is saved from being utterly licentious and
chaotic by having a form and content based closely (as a general
thing) upon the Tradition. It is a familiar art, and we all know
what to look for and how to read it when we see a fresh specimen.
Its privacy consists perfectly with its conventionality, its formality."
On the surface an espousal of the purely empirical basis of
poetry, Ransom's article in actuality seems less concerned to advo-
cate a doctrine of relativism than to establish the validity of a
formal and traditional approach to the art. Implicit in his state-
ments is the idea that whatever is universal in a poem must be
arrived at through temporal and local rituals, by submission to
the contingencies of history. If he is to be intelligible, the poet
must speak in his own language to his own people, who have a
common heritage.
The September Fugitive continued in its policy of giving space
to serious reviews, containing, besides Ransom's essay, Davidson's
critical estimate of two volumes: E. E. Cummings' XLI Poems and
Hervey Allen's Earth Moods. To Davidson, despite the two poets'
diverging attitudes toward the modern situation, both were faced
with the same problem, which was for Davidson the chief question
he continued to ask himself. "Given a rather chaotic modern
world, disturbing in its complexity, and along with it the traditional
instruments of the poet, how shall the poet orient himself, and
what bearing will the bewildering condition of the cosmos have on
his thought and on his form? "
Of the verse in the magazine, Ransom's dry and disciplined
lines represent the most considerable contribution. In " The Two
Worthies," a description of the dualism inherent in the Christian
structure, as represented by Jesus the Paraclete and Paul the
Exegete; and in " Husband Betrayed," a poem about a man who
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 213
has married a pigeon-like girl only to find her pigeon-like, Ransom
is meticulous and agreeable. " Janet Waking " and " History of
Two Simple Lovers," the other two poems in the issue, are among
Ransom's finest pieces. The second, a superbly rendered allegory,
portrays man in his mortal " torture of equilibrium." Two lovers
who desire each other are unable to consummate their love with
honor: the woman's body invites the embrace, but the "officious
tower " of her mind releases " grey doves " whose cry is " Honor,
honor."
Since they are noble lovers, they are unable either to give each
other up or to yield to their passion :
At length I saw these lovers fully were come
Into their torture of equilibrium :
Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.
The beauty of their bodies was the bond
Which these incarnate might not pass beyond;
Invincible proud Honor was the bar
Which made them not come closer but stay far.
And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
About the clustered night their prison world,
They burned with fierce love always to come near,
But honor beat them back and kept them clear.
The narrator, angered at the lovers for ruining their beauty, comes
" with puddled brow " to force them into a decision: " Man, what
would you have? " And the dilemma he presents is the age-old one:
Would you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell?
Or take your bodies honorless to Hell?
The finite conception of a supersensible heaven is no more satis-
fying to lovers than is the idea of a spiritless hell; the pair have
known they cannot choose, since choice would mean the renunci-
ation of a part of experience in favor of simplicity. But now the
spectator is convinced also, and his tone of raillery changes to
admiration and tenderness:
214 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
But still I watched them spinning, orbited nice.
Their flames were no more radiant than their ice.
I dug in the quiet earth and wrought the tomb
And made these lines to memorize the doom:
Equilibrists lie here; stranger, tread light;
Close but untouching in each other's sight;
Mouldered the lips and ashy the tall skull,
Let them lie perilous and beautiful.
In a letter to Tate written a year and a half later, Ransom was
to say: "Art is our refusal to yield to the blandishments of * con-
structive* philosophy and permit the poignant and actual Di-
chotomy to be dissatisfied in a Trichotomy; our rejection of third
Terms; our denial of Hegel's right to solve a pair of contradictions
with a Triad. And here's a slogan: Give us Dualism, or well give
you no Art." 20
Even in death, then, the " poignant and actual dichotomy "
cannot be simplified for the lovers: though their bodies are mould
ered, their intellects ashy, the pair must lie " close but untouching "
still. Because it is difficult to achieve, because a choice in either
direction would be infinitely less heroic, the state of equilibrium is
"perilous and beautiful." Man's conception of neither hell nor
heaven is adequate for the lovers; and the speaker, a mortal him-
self, cannot inform us of their ultimate metaphysical disposition.
Like Ransom's other most successful poems, " History of Two
Simple Lovers " achieves by the use of a dramatis persona a detach-
ment which gives the poem an air of complete finality. The noble,
statuesque beauty of the lovers is sustained throughout the work,
the feudal imagery for the woman providing overtones of dignity
and importance: " Body, it was a white field ready for love. / On
her body's field, with the gaunt tower above, / The lilies grew . . . ."
The device of the speaker (who represents generically, one would
thinkthe artist) gives form to the situation. At first angry, he
becomes perplexed; then, in the act of clarifying the problem and
placing before the lovers their two choices, he himself comes to an
"Wednesday [March, 1927].
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 215
understanding that there can be no resolution, that their precision
of elegant and torturesome balance is admirable. It is the anony-
mous speaker who digs " in the quiet earth " to make the tomb,
constructing his lines "to memorize the doom." The poem is
Ransom's most completely successful dramatization of his major
philosophical insight.
The other poems in the September issue are distinguished,
though not uniformly so. After Ransom, Crane perhaps made the
most valuable contribution to the issue, with his " Legend " and
" Paraphrase/' Davidson's three poems are of unequal merit. But
in "Projection of a Body upon Space," in which, as in "Cross
Section of a Landscape," Davidson makes use of mathematical
constructions, the personal vision is transformed and reprojccted,
as in the following lines:
What ribs of vacancy and shade are these
Marked by the failing sun against the heaven?
I am not wise in God's quaint pleasantries;
A shadow it is, not a pillar of fire or a raven.
Tate's one poem, " To a Romantic Novelist," (a polemic directed
against James Branch Cabell) 21 contains pointed phrases and a
pleasingly malicious wit, but it lacks the integrating rhythmic form
which Tate's best work shows, as well as the indirection of lan-
guage. Warren's four sonnets and Moore's six, as well as Mrs.
Gottschalk's three poems in the issue are all interesting and worthy
of inclusion, if not memorable. William Yandell Elliott, inside
The Fugitives covers for the sixth time in the magazine's history,
contributed two poems one of which, " Before Dawn," is the best
of his poems to appear in the journal, exhibiting a vigor of phrase
and rhythm, as in the lines
This is the thief's hour, wolf's, and the fly-by-night's:
Now ghoul and goblin share the haunted dark
With misshaped fear; a whippoorwill, from shadow
In the churchyard yews, reviles the sleeping lark.
"Tate to Davidson, August 22, 1925.
216 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
To the list of members in the September issue was added
Alfred Starr, a former Vanderbilt student in the class of Tate and
Jesse Wills. Starr had graduated from Harvard, and on his return
to Nashville he and his brother Milton, who were both good friends
of several of the Fugitives, had come to meetings but contributed
no poetry. In fact, Alfred Starr's relation to the group never be-
came more than nominal. The truth of the matter is that by now
the Fugitives realized that the next issue of the magazine would
have to be the last. Despite the fact that group meetings had
continued without abatement all during 1925 (and were to con-
tinue long after the suspension of the publication), the magazine
itself had been managed during the year chiefly by Ransom, War-
ren, and Davidson. Warren had gone to the University of Cali-
fornia at the beginning of the fall; this loss, combined with other
circumstances Tate's withdrawal from active membership, John-
son's break with the group, the failure of the minor members to
supply poems in keeping with Fugitive standards, and a growing
disinclination on the part of the group to continue a project that,
however affectionately and proudly viewed, had consumed much
time, energy, and spiritmade inevitable the necessity for dis-
continuance.
Ransom and Davidson were tired; the small details of keeping
The Fugitive going in addition to their own writing and teaching
had left them longing for time in which to write and study at some
leisure. And like most professors, they were never free of financial
worry. Ransom had offers from other universities; yet he preferred
to remain at Vanderbilt, even though the Chancellor was not en-
couraging about his chances for advancement to the status of full
professor. Davidson, discouraged, wondered if he had much future
at Vanderbilt or, indeed, in the South. 22
At the University of California, Warren was finding the literary
men "fifty years behind the times." No stimulating literary dis-
cussion there gripped and enthralled him as the talk had in Nash-
ville. Whereas the excitement on the Vanderbilt campus had
" Davidson to Tate, November 29, 1925.
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 217
concerned Pound and Eliot, the talk at Berkeley centered endlessly
around Marx and Engels. During the summer, before leaving the
South, Warren had collected a number of his poems at Tate's
instigation and worked them over for publication. He wrote Tate
that he had about thirty-eight in his manuscript and that he had
edited them so carefully that he had "few illusions left about
them." 23 But Warren was not to publish a volume of poetry until
eleven years later, long after he had completed several years of
the kind of scholarly study he was beginning at the University of
California in the fall.
Laura Riding Gottschalk had gone to New York in the early
fall, where she stayed near the Tates and made the acquaintance
of Tate's literary friends. They were impressed with her brilliance
and energy, and it was not long before she was involved in a
number of projects. Tate commented, " Laura's successes drive on
apace. That young lady has more energy than a phalanx of dyna-
mos, with seven billy-goats thrown in." 24
Tate's friendship with Edmund Wilson on the staff of The
New Republic had led to his being a regular reviewer for that
magazine. Other reviewing assignments likewise gave him the
opportunity to express himself on serious topics, so that, though
there was little money in this particularly gruelling activity, Tate
recognized it as the path which an independent literary man such
as himself must take. Consequently, in November, he resigned his
position with the Climax Publishing Corporation, converting him-
self into a free-lance writer in earnest. He wrote that he was now
" thoroughly a slave to reviews." 25
In his poetry, Tate's upheaval was continuing. He felt that
he was coming out of his stalemate and was striking out in the
direction of more positive views, no longer content for poetry to
express the negation of existence:
You remember [he wrote to Davidson] that certain "critics"
"July ii, 1925.
14 To Davidson [Autumn, 1925].
To Davidson, November 26, 1925.
15
218 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
thought our poetry in the first issues of The Fugitive was very much
alike, perhaps written by one man? Well, it was much alike, in spite
of the technical inequalities, for it was the expression of defeated men.
Mine was a little more ragged and violent, being produced by a young
man ....
I am not writing any poetry now; and the reason is obvious: I have
no idiom for a Vita Nuova, for it will take a long time for me even
to understand it. For poetry is the triumph of life, not a commentary
on its impossibility. 26
And concerning the social function of poetry, later in the same
letter he remarked: " Society is pretty degraded just now, and
we need poetry badly. But if poetry is merely a social defense it
can hardly be serious . . . ."
In Nashville, however, with the demise of The Fugitive im-
minent, it was difficult not to feel somewhat cut off and defeated.
Davidson wrote Tate:
I agree in the main with your estimate of poetry as a social defense,
and with your determination of the elements of likeness in Fugitive
poetry and the reason therefor. I would only supplement your remarks
by saying that I do believe most of us really have approached poetry as
a fine art and not in the spirit of dilettantes or moralists. That has been
our great strength, that and our seriousness. But I will acknowledge
that the defeatism crept in, some strain of it at least, in the bulk of
Fugitive poetry, and so our " pure art " has here and there been touched
with indignation or with wistfulness depending on the reaction of the
writer to his confinements. It is possible, though, that what you term
defeatism isn't a permanent quality; I hope it isn't. And I think, in
your case as in mine and others, the surest way to pass beyond and out
of defeatism is to acknowledge the thing for what it is in the hope that
some sort of purgation may finally be accomplished. Then may come
the Vita Nuova and the triumphant idiom which you desire.- 7
In his fall summary of the year's poetry, Braithwaite had again
singled out The Fugitive for special praise, designating it the
" most distinctive poetry magazine in America ... the best edited
8 * November 26, 1925.
27 November 29, 1925.
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 219
of them all." " 8 From New York Tate sent his hail and farewell
to the journal: "I await the last Fugitive with much pleasure,"
he wrote; "not because it is the last but because it's The
Fugitive! " M
But the final issue of the magazine, though no disappointment
in quality, indicates that the magazine would have had to change
radically in character had it continued. Deprived of Warren's and
Tatc's poems (Tate contributed one piece to the issue, though he
was no longer interested in publishing a quantity of poems nor in
publishing often) the magazine had to rely for its bulk chiefly
upon the six poems each of Moore and Laura Gottschalk, who had
been represented at great length in its pages all year. Ransom and
Davidson contributed generously to the issue, but Ransom was no
longer concerned with using the journal as a means to print, and
Davidson had reached a stage in his work where he needed to pro-
ceed with less haste and more privacy than the quarterly afforded.
Stevenson was the only other Fugitive in the December pages, and
three outsiders, Crane, Graves, and McClellan, took up the rest
of the space.
In the back of the final issue a lengthy editorial by Ransom gave
the reason for discontinuance: "The action is taken because there
is no available Editor to take over the administrative duties inci-
dental to the publication of a periodical of even such limited scope
as the FUGITIVE. The Fugitives are busy people, for the most part
enslaved to Mammon, their time used up in vulgar bread-and-
butter occupations. Not one of them is in a position to offer himself
on the altar of sacrifice." The announcement went on to make
clear that a lack of neither financial backing nor poetry caused the
suspension; and it assured the public that the group would still
meet: " For that matter, the Fugitives will continue to hold their
frequent meetings for the reading and discussion of poetry and
philosophy; we were holding these meetings for years before the
""Through the Year with the Poets," the Boston Evening Transcript,
November 21, 1925.
89 To Davidson, November 26, 1925.
220 The fugitive Group: A Literary History
thought of publication was entertained, and we shall go on holding
them after publication, for the time being, has stopped."
And, although nothing definite could be promised concerning
further publication from the Fugitives, Ransom expressed his hope
that not a year might pass "without some kind of published
exhibit to break the silence/' The editorial assured its readers that
the experience of publishing The Fugitive had been rewarding:
" No Fugitive dreamed in the beginning that our magazine would
meet with the success that it has. We have completed four years
of honorable existence in the midst of the keenest competition for
the ear of the lovers of poetry; we have supplied ourselves with
rich experience, we have made many loyal friends, and we have,
unless all signs fail, won a certain respect from the bigwigs which
an unpretentious and provincial magazine had no reason to expect."
The final book review in the magazine, written by Davidson,
is somewhat prophetically entitled " The Future of Poetry." A dis-
cussion of a book by 1\. C. Trcvelyan, in which the author had
found that the " primal song-function of poetry " had " atrophied
and practically disappeared," Davidson's essay undertook to view
the development of the art optimistically. Instead of lamenting the
loss of its song-function, Davidson stated, we should perhaps be
more concerned to appreciate the greater variety and subtlety
offered in the " multiplication of species." The " distant and
humble " ancestor of poetry is of as hypothetical nature, he sug-
gested, as is the Missing Link in the story of the human genesis.
But, as though to refute their own author, three of Davidson's
poems in the issue, " Pastorals Somewhat in the Modern Style,"
all sound the note of loss for the simple purity of the past:
Oh, whom shall Echo love
In a grey room where is
No shepherd boy to claim her,
Coming where Echo lies
With no kiss to claim her?
Here certainly the poem predicts a theme that is to become an
explicit tenet in Davidson's later criticism. Perhaps a poem rcpre-
The End of The Fugitive: 1925 221
sents a moment of actual grace, that intermittent light which
clarifies and illuminates the occasion without enlightening the poet.
To extend these separate moments of claritas into a coherent set of
principles upon which to base one's life is a task requiring long
work and self-integration.
So it was that, as the magazine expired, the four men to whom
it had meant most were in stages of philosophic belief which they
were soon to modify and enlarge; and The Fugitive must not be
denied its share of credit in their development. It had provided
the necessity and the opportunity for intelligent men to express
themselves in poetry to learn their art and to reach a public
without the restrictions of toadying to a sponsor or of conforming to
a theory. Not only intrinsically, but also functionally, it had been
the most valuable amateur magazine in literary history.
C II A P T H R HIGH T
TOWARD UNDERSTANDING-
THE FUGITIVE ANTHOLOGY
AND THE BEGINNINGS
OF AGRARIANISM:
i 926 1 928
What shall we do wlio have knowledge
Carried to the heart?
THEENDOF The Fugitive in no wise marked
the end of the Fugitives; on the contrary, relieved of the worrisome
details of editing and circulating the magazine, the group was able
to function again in the genial amateur spirit, with philosophic and
aesthetic discussion its chief aims. During the next few years meet-
ings were untroubled by business matters, and such notable guests
as Louis Untermeyer, /, Robert Frost, and John Gould Fletcher
came to spend an evening in the Frank home and to share in the
group conversation, which in its character was gentlemanly, graci-
ous, and astringent.
Of the members left in Nashville, Ransom and Davidson were
busiest at writing poetry and criticism: Ransom's third volume of
verse Two Gentlemen in Bonds was accepted by Knopf in the
spring of 1926, to issue from the press during 1927, and a projected
prose work had turned his mind to the consideration of aesthetic
222
Toward Understanding: 1926-1928 223
principles; Davidson, having won the South Carolina Poetry
Society's "Southern" Prize with his "Fire on Belmont Street,"
was occupied with a new idea in poetry which he called the " Long
Street" series 1 and with his increasingly successful book page.
Of the others, Moore was studying at Vanderbilt Medical School,
producing new sonnets with unabated fecundity; Curry had re-
cently completed the eight years of research required for his
Chaucer volume; 2 Jesse Wills and Stevenson were prospering in
their business careers, yet still writing verse that, if infrequent,
was the product of fine craftsmanship and intelligent minds. Frank
and I lirsch were back in their clement now that the magazine was
no longer the controlling interest in the meetings, for these two
were second to none in the group in the pursuance of cultivated
and widely ranging conversation.
For real literary exchange the most serious and mature writers
in the group still turned to each other; and, though he was away,
Tate was the common bond uniting Ransom, Davidson, and War-
ren, all from various points on a circumference that gradually
assumed the fulness of a completed aesthetic and metaphysical
circle. Ransom and Davidson, working together daily at Vander-
bilt, were intimately connected with one another's thinking; but
the Fugitive genius for thought required the additional stimulation
of the written word. Thus, in these years immediately after the
discontinuance of the magazine, the correspondence between David-
son and Tate, Ransom and Tate, and, to a smaller degree, Warren
and Tate developed the mature view of each with a wholeness
and clarity not available to the isolated thinker.
Tate was living in Patterson, New York, he and his wife shar-
ing half a house with Hart Crane. Involved in publishing schemes
and commissioned for reviews and articles, Tate was gaining in
the literary world the foothold for which he had struggled. A
venture he was planning with Edmund Wilson was a poetry series
to be undertaken by the Adelphi Press, a presentation of new
x To be published as The Tall Men (Boston and New York: Houghton
Miffiin Company, 1927).
* Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences.
224 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
poets in the following order Laura Riding (the former Laura
Riding Gottschalk), 3 Tate, Phelps Putnam, Malcolm Cowley,
Crane, Wilson, and John Peale Bishop. Miss Riding had tried to
assume the leadership in the project and ended by causing some
little dissension; but, at the end of the year, she had sailed for
England to join Robert Graves and his wife and children on a trip
to Egypt. Soon after she left, the poetry series was abandoned,
but her own book, The Close Chaplet, appeared early in 1926.
Tate's work had recently received from T. S. Eliot a minute
criticism, the effect of which was both " flattering and discourag-
ing." To Davidson, Tate commented, " Eliot is uncanny in tracing
out my influences and defects." 4 But, though Tate was closely in
touch with provocative and original writers in New York, he relied
on sustenance from Davidson's criticism that he could not find
elsewhere. " You are one of the few that can be depended on for
a clean reaction," he wrote;
you have always given me your views forthright, from the time you
didn't like my verse down to now, when you seem to be liking it better;
and I must say I value the old unfavorable opinion as highly ....
It is the consistency of attitude much more valuable than con-
sistency of opinion that I like. I can put it this way: you have not
seen the necessity of fitting me or disposing of me in a fixed little
cosmology of competitions and rivalries in which you make yourself
safe for Donald Davidson. 5
The letter which occasioned Tate's acknowledgment is brilli-
antly perceptive and as Tate discerned indicative of Davidson's
ability to appreciate qualities quite alien to his own writing:
Heretofore [Davidson wrote], in your poetry there has been so
often a lack of elasticity that you left your reader in a state of defeat,
unable to bridge the ellipses which your close crowding of images and
ideas produced; there was (as I saw it) not enough play in your lines;
8 She began using her maiden name in 1927, according to a letter to
Davidson, undated, written that year.
* June 26, 1926.
6 To Davidson, April 2, 1926.
Toward Understanding: 1926-1928 225
your association of ideas was very rich, but it produced that " tele-
scoping of imagery " to which I recall Curry objected. In these three
poems this defect does not appear, if defect it is .... You seem to me
to be approaching or even attaining perfection in the only kind of poetry
which your artistic conscience will permit you to write. I may regret
that your conscience has driven you into a narrow lane from which I
can see no emerging; but I accept, since it is your choice, both the lane
and you, and I do not know of any other poetry in this field which
has such a cast of the inevitable in phrasing or which represents more
adequately the artistic reactions of a thoroughly twentieth century mind,
encircled by a complex whirl of influences, yet so far abstracted from
them as to be sensitive (if remotely) to tradition. Furthermore, though
Dr. Mims and even Ransom would think of your poetry as poetry of
the head, I do not see it that way; it is intellectual poetry, to be sure,
but intellectual poetry pouring a definite light (as Donne's did) on
physical and emotional experience.
Reciprocally, Tate's opinion meant much to Davidson, for he
acknowledged the other man's closer immersion in the real poetic
experimentation of the day, as well as his critical acumen. David-
son had sent Tate portions of his " Long Street " poems, and Tate
replied with a lengthy and detailed criticism. Despite some rather
serious reservations about the new work, he was certain that David-
son could produce important poetry, totally different from his own
or Ransom's:
First, let me say a word about the plan of a Tennessee Faust. It
looks very impressive; and I think you can make it work. Just reading
these selections, I am reminded of the true definition of poetry with
respect to time and place that it must be local to be universal; while on
the other hand, much poetry that deliberately sets out to be universal
merely exposes its provincialism .... As to the possible success, how-
ever, of such a poem in the grand style, that of course I couldn't predict
any more than could you. But I'd like to see it tried out; and I can
think of nobody else who could do it better than you. I couldn't even
begin it; Ransom probably has too much of the same poison in his
system as I have to do it. 7
To Tate, March 29, 1926.
7 To Davidson, May 14, 1926.
226 The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
But actually, Tate continued, he preferred Davidson's previous
lyrics; Eliot was right, he felt, in pointing out the absence of
important themes for modern poets. That the individual mind
was less important in the production of literature than was the
culture, Tate was certain; and the dissolution of our culture was
a fact that could not be escaped even in Tennessee: "I think
there is one fundamental law of poetry, and it is negative: you
can't create a theme. Themes are or are not available. If you can
name me a single great poem the theme of which the poet invented,
I'll send you a case of beer for the Fourth of July. Remember a
great poem. You can't put your epic of Tennessee into the minds
of Tennesseans; the precondition of your writing it is that it must
(in an equivalent of spiritual intensity) be already there." 8
In his reply, Davidson was concerned to set one matter straight:
" But I must refute other implications by declaring that I am not
writing an epic (Good Lord, surely not an epic) for Tennesseans.
I will merely use your phrase and say that I'm writing the history
of a mind my mind, to an extent." 9
By the end of the year, when the nine parts making up the
" Long Street " series (which Davidson had now entitled The Tall
Men) were completed and ready for publication, Tate was still
dissatisfied with the work. He found in it many " fine lines and
passages," but on the whole he considered that it represented a
"failure to reduce the material at hand to order":
I think the best comment I can produce on the mixture of your
performance is that I should expect you to keep on writing the poem
indefinitely: the solution of your poetical problem is no clearer on
page 84 than on page i; so why should you stop there? Of course,
you offer a solution of another sort; I may call it a doctrine of love. You
didn't need to write a poem to expound the doctrine. On the other
hand, there is no reason why the exposition of a doctrine shouldn't be
poetry. I simply believe that on the whole yours isn't. 10
Tate was so deeply convinced that the poem was not ready for
To Davidson, May 14, 1926.
To Tate, June 14, 1926.
10 To Davidson, December 29, 1926.
Toward Understanding: 1926-1928 227
publication that he wrote in great urgency: " For God's sake, Don,
don't publish the poem in its present state. The material has great
possibilities, but it is not yet mastered." "
A few days later, still concerned over the poem, Tate wrote
again, recalling that he had once remarked to Davidson, " Our past
is buried so deep that it is all but irrecoverable." He was convinced
that, although Davidson thought his subject matter important to
him, actually it was not, since it had not been converted into poetry.
In this same letter Tate enclosed two "new ones" of his own,
asking Davidson to " slaughter " them. 12
One of these " new ones " was the " Ode to the Confederate
Dead," Tatc's now-famous poem dealing with modern man's in-
ability to transcend the bonds of subjectivity and, hence, his failure
to understand or accept the past. Davidson's dismay at his friend's
direction in this work was as great as Tate's had been earlier at the
method of The Tall Men. Charging that man 
