The South had a heroic past; it was rich with legend and fierce with feeling; there was no particular reason why Southerners then beginning to write should not make the fullest possible use of the material at hand. Out of the Southern tradition there ought to grow an exciting, possibly a really great Southern poetry which would be a considerable ornament to American letters...
It is time to state Miss Monroe's proposition again, though in slightly different terms. After all, it is a fair question to ask why Southern poets, as artists with a very special local heritage, cannot write like Southerners, rather than like "advanced" Parisians or Greenwich villagers; and why they cannot, among other things, write about the indubitably Southern themes, even the Southern legends, places, heroes, though that alone, of course, will not make them Southern poets, or in fact, poets of any sort.
Yet this, it seems, is precisely what many of them cannot do, or cannot without falling into grievous error. A young poet "emerging" in the South today is in danger of following one of two courses, both of which are bad:
1) In one case he will utterly divorce himself fromo all sense of locality and at once begin to write clever but trifling imitations of decadent poetasters in New York, London, and Paris.
2) But if he is safely illiterate and so manages to escape the infection of our times, he may then write "Southern" poetry containing very proper local references: and this is sure to be as empty as the other was clever.
One tendency gives us modernists of every type - people who begin by grandly renouncing their birthright and by contributing to worldly messiah magazines...The other tendency begets local laureates: cheerful infants who commit monstrosities such as state songs on the model of Katherine Lee Bates' "America the Beautiful."
It almost amounts to this: that a poet cannot be "Southern" without behaving like a fool; and if he tries not to be a fool, he will not be recognizably "Southern."
This extends to modern writers of fiction - "Yankee" novels extol the virtues of the downtrodden black man and the vices of the depraved white men in the South. I should be the last to decry the excellence that the better of these writers display. but it is evident that the attitudes underlying their work are too often borrowed from the progressive North and do not belong to the conservative South.
Yet they should not be blamed too harshly. In America - or at least in the progressive America which has been most vocal in recent years - every man who starts out to be an artist is subjected to a subtle but powerful pressure to emancipate himself from his native surroundings...he must get out and grab what he can from the set of rapidly shifting formulae spawned from the disorder of a delocalized, vaguely cosmopolitan society, masquerading rather noisily as a civilization.
What does this society, loudly proclaiming its devotion to culture and the good life, have to teach the artist? To judge from the evidence, it teaches contempt, suspicion, disillusionment; it has no positive standards to offer, other than a maudlin apostrophe to Beauty, and no loyalties to anything nearer at hand than a somewhat tenuous world-soul...as exemplified here:
"It is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to doubt is often to take sides with fact against oneself" - Everett Dean Martin
Whatever it may mean for the scientist, this pronouncement offers a lamentable prospect for the poet, who must believe or perish. It is no wonder that our artists believe nothing; or by a natural reaction, they turn in and believe too much, trying vainly to rebuild a personal mythology of some kind as a substitute for the tradition that the worshippers of doubt have destroyed.
Having once got hold of an idea, even though it be not quite a perfect idea, the South does not hasten to discard it, but keeps holding on. The South has never been able to understand how the North, in its astonishing quest for perfection, can junk an entire system of ideas almost overnight, and start on another one which is no better than the first.
The South ought to have an artistic tradition to fit its social and historical background. One ought to be able to say of it, as AE said of Ireland, that it is a good field for the arts, especially for poetry, simply because, in contrast to progressive America, it has long been defeated and poor and behind the times; or, furthermore, because it offers its people belief rather than doubt, conviction rather than skepticism, loyalty rather than distrust. These ought to be something virile and positive in its art, as an art linked by devotion to a concrete place rather than animated by a loose enthusiasm for a "national" culture which has no organic unity behind it.
I should hardly join with those determined Rebels who defend Southern literature at any cost against the aspersions of Yankee critics.
Poe and Lanier vs Emerson and Whitman
Yet on the whole one might well say with John Crowe Ransom that the arts of the South in times past took another direction than poetry. They were the eighteenth-century arts of dress, conversation, manners: or, I might add, of architecture, handicraft, oratory, anecdote...There is no reason to think that these arts did not express a Southern tradition rather intimately and without any fumbling or debate. Indeed, the problem of the relation of the Southern artist to his tradition did not then arise in its modern form.
Now, however, it has arisen, and the issues it raises are acute. If the South is destined, as so many people are saying, to be "articulate" on a scale never before realized, it would be a strange trick of fate for writers to find themselves, at such a moment, inhibited from a free expression of the Southern Tradition, unable to speak for the South as a living historic entity which is separate from America though bound to it, and still abiding to a marked degree by the tenets of a civilization so thoroughly un-American (in the modern sense) that it is in one breath romantically admired and in the next breath harshly deplored by the much interested North.
the so-called Southern liberal group, who have of late grown much in power, sided by Northern philanthropy and by agitation in Northern journals, have bent every energy to persuade the South to make over its civilization on the progressive Northern plan, largely through the combined agencies of a sweeping industrialization and a large scale "liberalized" scheme of public education. The effect of this program has undoubtedly been to dislocate many Southern writers from a proper relation to their own people and their own tradition.
The progressive leaders, in short, are asking the Southern writer to pay a terrible price for his modernity...Theirs will be the dilemma of the modern artist who in one act must both deny himself and express himself.
There is no remedy, short of the rise to power of a body of Southern writers, economists, politicians, and clergy who will fight to a finish the new order of carpetbaggers and scalawags - or else assimilate them. But even this remedy has much peril for the arts, which do not profit much by contentiousness. It is certain, however, that the well-wishers for the South cannot with one gesture "uplift" the South into the blessings of modern civilization, and with another demand of Southern writers that they exhibit in their works the virtues of a way of life that they have just been urged to repudiate. Yet if there is hope - and I think that there is much hope, in view of the extraordinary confusion into which industrial civilization has got itself - the poets are likely to go further than other writers toward realizing the ideal of a free expression of the Southern character in literature. For the poets are unpopular, the poets are never promoted, they escape the commercial taint that hangs over novelists and playwrights. Let them, then, write what they will, depending on their own integrity for a guide, and if they live like the Miller of Dee, envying nobody and with nobody envying them, they need not fear that their integrity will be impugned or spoiled.
- Donald Davidson
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