the last bulwark against socialist revolution

Could the South rise again?

Ransom did not know. But he felt confident that the southern, not the 'American' or progressive, way of life enjoyed the sanction of history and the blessing of God. - 45

The typical Southerner never believed that the sole responsibility of a man lay in the work that he performed, nor did he think that his value could be measured by his material prosperity. His business seemed to be rather to envelop both his work and his play with a leisure which permitted the activity of intelligence. - 47

To deliver the United States from its gross economic miscalculations, Ransom hoped to agitate a counterrevolution that would reinstate a traditional agrarian way of life, freed from the burdens of international commerce. - 52

Agrarians were the last free men in America...The social relations of an agrarian community were personal, moral, and neighborly, not perfunctory, juridicial, and economic...The old fashioned agrarian economy was, by nature, inefficient, its proprietors savoring the privileged liberty to work or ot and in their ample spare time to read or doze, to hunt, to fish, or to contemplate the splendor of creation. - 53

Perhaps the greatest advantage of the agrarian way of life was the restraint it imposed on human ambition. - 56

Amid the anarchy ensuing in the wake of revolution, bedeviled citizens would clamor for the reimposition of order and would listen to anyone who promised to deliver...

The American people, already obedient and disciplined through long familiarity with the industrialist regime, would surrender their integrity, responsibility, and independence in exchange for assurances of economic prosperity and social peace.

The backward, agrarian South thus stood as the last bulwark against socialist revolution, postponing indefinitely the communist millenium.

"Farmers are bad medicine for Marxists."

Communism naturally proceeded from corporate capitalism, and both threatened the agrarian South. Southern civilization rested on a tradition of local independence, and southerners defied the concentrated power of the corporation and the state, whether dominated by capitalists or communists. - 57

Southerners were devoted to leisure, and leisure was the prerequisite for aesthetic experience.

The South may have been impoverished, but the region and its people possessed a secret spiritual wealth that empowered them to take their stand against the machine. - 58

Nature is an object both for knowledge and to use; the latter disposition of nature includes that knowledge of it which is peculiarly scientific, and sometimes it is so impervious as to preempt all possibility of the former.

The Agrarians could not be both patriots and poets, unless they were content to write bad poetry. - 63

Tate intended his program not only to conceive a distinctly southern literary and intellectual tradition but to articulate a complete world view that would form the basis of a southern conservative movement.

"Our intentions would be two and they would look contradictory; to have our literature created by persons of philosophical capacity; and to have its pure forms without taint of explicit philosophy." - John Crowe Ransom

Ransom wanted an 'American' academy of letters, not Southern - "To establish a southern academy would bring the Agrarian, at least those who composed poetry, into dangerous proximity to the patriotic fervor that threatened to dissolve their poetic sensibilities."

Artists and writers who had accommodated themselves to industrial capitalism could retreat from the rough world of economics and politics into the isolated enclave of the liberal arts college, where art, literature, and criticism flourished. Although these delicate souls lived economically and politically in the world of mass production and mass consumption, they could somehow live intellectually and spiritually according to the ancient Western tradition of letters which was founded upon the land. -64

Human beings lived in a fallen world of their own making...they had to recognize that their very survival depended on the use and even exploitation of men and nature - Men in modern society could not return to the original state of human purity, simplicity, and innocence, but they could seek salvation from their fallen state by adopting the means of repentance at hand.

Art returned modern men to their originall innocence. This vicarious and formal transformation compensated human beings for their sense of alienation from nature, from each other, from themselves, and from God without requiring them to abandon what Ransom called the 'forward economy.'

[Ideally] the division of labor liberated man from drudgery and hardship through technological innovation...

Specialization of labor also enhanced the freedom to pursue artistic projecs. No longer constrained to produce for themselves the essentials of life, men possessed of literary and artistic genius could devote their time to the contemplation and creation of beauty...With the disapearance of art, modern men would lose the one means of renewal, revitalization, and redemption available to them, the one means of defying the worst ravages of an industrialized world.

Upon the division of labor, therefore, rested not only the production of goods but the creation of art. By freeing writers and artists, the divisions of labor directly supported their vocation...For the artist or writer, the pursuit of his vocation was worth any adversity or affliction.

The Underlying goal of the Agrarian movement - the attempt to fashion a humane way of life in the modern world.

For John Crowe Ransom tools became poetry and criticism rather than politics and economics. - 68

In Allen Tate's view, art and culture could not flourish or even survive without revelation...The value of art lay in illuminating the contradictory nature of the human condition. Men were finite creatures who aspired to transcend their finitude.

The proper role for writers, Tate thought, was not to incite political revolution, excite religious revival, or inspire social reform but to explain the consequences of ignoring the conditions under which God permitted life on earth.

Tate devoted his entire career as a poet and an essayist to challenging the one-dimensional view of man that rejected the transcendent dimension of human existence and suggested that all human problems were subject to human, i.e. political, scientific, or technological solutions. The modern man of letters, according to Tate, could not propose alternatives or provide solutions...the writer could not construct a social, political, or spiritual order that would hold chaos at bay.

The modern man of letters, according to Tate, had the responsibility to reject the spiritual conditions of modern man.

"The secular has forgotten that hell exists, because they have lost the language to describe it."

Hence the principal duty of the man of letters was to revitalize and protect a language that depicted the complexity and mystery; the joy and agony, of the human condition. If men of letters did not call attention to sin and its wages, Tate feared, modern men would confidently deny them, for man lived under the barbarous disability of believing that the evils they could not name, did not exist. The poet had to identify and define those aspects of the human condition that the others could not discern. He must detail not his enemies' hell, but his own. -70

He [man of letters] has to render the image of man as he is in his time, which without the man of letters, would not otherwise be known. What modern literature has taught us is not merely that the man of letters has not participated fully in the action of society; it has taught us that nobody else has either. It is a fearful lesson...

Tate scorned the idea of the retreat of men of letters into some safe haven -72

Donald Davidson desired to return mind to the service of a society of myth and tradition. to that end, he attempted to reconstitute the ancient community of the pagan tribe and to resurrect it in the modern South. Davidson scorned the modern products of mind - science, technology, and industry - and declared that the best way to end the crisis of modernity was to cultivate piety for the southern tradition. He discovered his image of the modern man of letters not, like Tate, in the besieged figure of the medieval clerk who depicted the sources of tension in and the hope for redemption from, the human condition but in the heroic figure of the bard who sang the glories of his people and who recalled for them their origin, their identity, and their destiny.

The authority of the man of letters as bard became, for Davidson, the instrument through which the South would assert its redemptive power. -73

Poetry thus captured a reality that science ignored. Individualist, particular, contingent, and unpredictable, poetry defied the restrictive logic of science that insisted on abstraction, analysis...

Poetry reconstituted the "world's body" by acknowledging the fullness and complexity of the world of actual things - a fullness and complexity that remained concealed from the scientific understanding.

Poetry intends to recover the denser and more refractory original world which we know loosely through our perception and memories...poetry confirmed that the world was not merely logical or functional, not utterly subject to the preoccupations of human intellect and will.

Poetry had the advantage of being apolitical, or remaining untainted by the half-truths of ideology. The truth of poetry was the truth of life. - 84

-Mark Malvasi, from The Unregenerate South