The Fugitives

Though many American poets have attended universities and taught in them, the Fugitives remain the one outstanding poetic school which developed naturally from a campus environment. The fact that a university was as much the "native" environment for the Fugitives as the South tends to demonstrate that for a long time it was the last stronghold of European aristocratic culture in the midst of a thriving democratic society. If the American university is no longer such an aristocratic stronghold, being forced, like the South, to yield to egalitarian pressures, nevertheless, during the period when the Fugitives were most active, it could be said that the university was the South, or at least the most enduring part of it.

Something like this has to be said, in order to make clear the ambivalent role the Fugitives played as Southerners. That they were Southerners, there can be no doubt, as much as Robert Frost was a New Englander or Robinson Jeffers a Westerner. But from the first, their loyalties were mixed: "THE FUGITIVE flees from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South," they proclaimed in their first issue, and in all subsequent issues they continued to argue the point. There was at first no consciously regional bias in their poetry; in fact they quarreled publicly with what they took to be the restrictive view of Southern culture, as expressed in an editorial in Poetry magazine that seemed to call for a Southern poetry that would be nostalgically and quaintly local. When Harriet Monroe, the editor, disclaimed such a view in her next issue, The Fugitive editors explained that "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." They made it clear that they were against both "atavism" and "sentimentality" in Southern writing, vices that were all too familiar in the "moonlight and magnolia" school that had arisen in the South after the Civil War. In an editorial in the June, 1924, issue of The Fugitive, Davidson listed among the "Fallacies of Modern Poetry" the assumption that "A Good Poet must have Local Color." He went on to explain:

"Frost has written of New England, Sandburg of Chicago, but whatever is good in their poetry is good not merely because they wrote of specific places. Place is incidental; it is subordinate; it may even form a definite limitation, and perhaps does in the case of much American poetry. At the best, it is merely a picturesque addition, not the inner substance of poetry."

Perhaps the best evidence that the Fugitives were not sentimentally, but critically, Southern is to be found in their poetry, where the ironic tone cuts through the veil of myth surrounding the scenes and characters, and reveals the age and decay crumbling the Old South into ruin. Ransom wrote of the "Antique Harvesters" that peopled the Southern landscape, looking like figures from a tapestry rather than real farmers with a field to plow, and he made of his "Captain Carpenter" a figure of gentle mockery, a sort of Southern Don Quixote who courageously but weakly defended his code of honor, until finally there was nothing left of him but a carrion for the kites; and he pictured himself in "Old Mansion" as an "intruder" who looked hard at the "house whose legend could in no wise be brief," and mused:

"It was a Southern manor. One need hardly imagine

Towers, white monoliths, or even ivied walls;

But sufficient state if its peacock was a pigeon;

Where no courts held, but grave rites and funerals."

The images of age and death that are present in so much Fugitive poetry are in one sense a link with the earlier Gothic South of Edgar Allen Poe ("Our Cousin, Mr. Poe" as Tate acknowledged in a discreetly appreciative essay), but they are also evidence of the obsolescence of Southern culture, and proof that the poets were much aware of its transience and fragility. In the most famous of Fugitive poems, Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," there is a similar point of reference to earlier Southern poetry (specifically, Henry Timrod's brief "Ode" for the dedication of the Charleston cemetery, just after the Civil War) but an equally strong disclaimer of blind loyalty to the past:

"What shall we say who have knowledge

Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act

To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave

In the house? The ravenous grave?"

Though no solution is found to the poet's dilemma, poised as he is between an unrecoverable, heroic past and an indeterminate, chaotic present, he has no hope of clinging to remembered glories: the isolation of the figure in the cemetery is final, and his only consolation is that it is a common evil all men must face:

"Leave now

The shut gate and the decomposing wall:

The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,

Riots with his tongue through the hush -

Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!"

Tate's Southern version of The Waste Land shows man trapped in time, honoring the past but unable to live by it, a victim of his own self-consciousness, tempted like Narcissus to embrace his own image and drown, but too stoic to give in to the despair he feels in the presence of evil and death. As Davidson perceptively wrote to Tate after seeing an early manuscript version of the "Ode" in 1927: "Your Elegy is not for the Confederate dead, but for your own dead emotion..."

There is so much in Fugitive poetry, in fact, that directly parallels the experience so powerfully expressed in that other great writer of the modern South, William Faulkner, who was equally severe in criticizing the land he never ceased to love. To place Tate's "Ode" beside such novels as Sartoris or The Sound and the Fury, written at almost the same historical moment, is to see how strikingly they portray a common experience: that of the South in crisis, too weak to throw off the old shell of the past, so entangled in an outworn tradition that the only choice left to the sensitive individual is suicide, a choice actually taken by Bayard Sartoris and Quentin Compson in Faulkner's novels, and vividly imagined by the spokesman in Tate's poem. Only the tragic grandeur and sympathy of the portrayal in each case relieves the hopelessness of the human situation.

To place Faulkner beside the Fugitives is only to recognize the dominant roles they have played in the Renaissance of modern Southern literature. Between them, the spoils may be almost equally divided. If Faulkner is unquestionably greater as an isolated genius, the Fugitives have been greater as a civilizing instrument in Southern letters. There is still no novelist the equal of Faulkner anywhere in the South, and there are still no poets who can compare with the Fugitives in sustained achievement. If Faulkner is the prize example of the natural talent, or what might be called the rewards of self-education, the Fugitives are the prize examples of the tutored talent, or the rewards of formal education. What bound them together as artists and men was loyalty to their native region, in spite of its decadence, and adherence to the old ideal of Jeffersonian Agrarianism.

This is not to identify the Fugitives with the Agrarians, which would only lead to confusion. The Fugitives and the Agrarians were two separate schools, one of which was exclusively literary, the other just as exclusively social and political. The Agrarians were not organized until after the Fugitives had disbanded, and then they included only four members - albeit the major ones - of the previous group: Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren. The Southern Agrarians, whose symposium, I'll Take My Stand, aroused so much criticism as a "reactionary" social document, must be understood in the context of the Depression years, when radical solutions to the American financial crisis were being proposed on all sides. The Agrarians were political idealists of the South, who tried to take a broad view of the common predicament, and who believed as Jefferson had believed (and as Faulkner also believed) that human culture has its grass roots in agriculture: destroy the intimate relation between man and nature, their argument ran, and you destroy the fertility of human imagination, and with it both men's satisfaction with life and their pleasure in art. The belief in an agrarian society was too deeply rooted in Southern life and character to be easily out-grown, and when the crisis of the American industrial system came, it was natural for Southerners to turn to what they thought was the one sure way of sustaining life and character. The Fugitives had not been conscious regionalists; in fact, they had opposed the regional approach to poetry; but in becoming responsible critics of society, they discovered their regional bias.

As Tate put it for the whole Fugitive group:

"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...Fugitive poetry turned out to be profoundly sectional in that it was supported by the prejudices, feelings, values, into which the poets were born."

What is most Southern in Fugitive poetry is more than Agrarianism; it is a special compound of local qualities, some of which are historical, some geographical, and some temperamental. Among the historical, one would include the many Classical references, the Greek names and Latin phrases, that so richly season this poetry. The Fugitive poets, like the little girls in Katherine Anne Porter's story, Old Mortality, seem to have been brought up in the belief that "one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments" But the historical would also include the broad perspective from which these poets view the contemporary world:

"Where we went in the boat was a long bay

A slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone -

Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,

And we went there out of time's monotone:"

So begins Tate's "The Mediterranean," with a majestic sweep of space and time that seems to place one above the earth, looking down from a great height. Again,

"We are the children of an ancient band

Broken between the mountains and the sea,"

writes Warren, seeing his westward-moving race in a more tragic Exodus to the Promised Land, which they can never quite reach or claim. Southern poetry, like Southern culture, is heavy with the historical sense, which as T.S. Eliot defined it in a famous passage

"compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer on and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order."

The geographical element is equally prominent in this poetry, not as quaint "local color," or painted backdrop, but as a felt relation to the land:

"Autumn days in our section

Are the most used-up thing on earth

(or in the waters under the earth)

Having no more color nor predilection

Than cornstalks too wet for the fire,

A ribbon rotting on the byre,

A man's face weathered as straw

By the summer's flare and winter's flaw."

It must have been just such a stanza that inspired so cosmopolitan an American poet as Wallace Stevens to exclaim: "Mr. Ransom's poems are composed of Tennessee." Reading through a collection of Fugitive poetry, one realizes anew that the South has a religion of place, a mystique of locale, that is impossible to defined by any means except poetry. Southerners specialize in local deities, and can raise a wild bear into an image of God, as in Faulkner's The Bear, or can penetrate deep into the wilderness, as in Davidson's "Sanctuary," where

"Men have found

Images carved in bird-shapes there and faces

Moulded into the great kind look of gods."

This same Southern love of place is what forms half its temperament, for the slowness of motion and speech, the indolence and "drawl," as well as the hot-bloodedness, are properties the climate instills in all races of the South. The other half of the Southern temperament, however, is not a matter of climate, but has to do with the feudal character of Southern society; it comes out in the courtly politeness of manner, the reverence for the aged and the dead, the sense of stability and permanence in human values - all vestiges of the older order of things. It does not matter that the South failed to establish this "old order" in the New World for more than a few generations, at most; what matters is that the feeling for a hierarchical social order remains, like the love of land and the faith in God, as a kind of essential rightness, to betray which would be to betray oneself, and to lose heart completely:

"True, it is said of our Lady, she ageth,

But see, if you peep shrewdly, she hath not stooped;

Take no thought of her servitors that have drooped,

For we are nothing; and if one talk of death -

Why, the ribs of the earth subsist frail as a breath

If but God wearieth."

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Though the poets dropped their pseudonyms, after two issues of The Fugitive, and revealed their proper names, they left the name of their magazine undefined. "It seemed to be a secret among us, though no one knew what the secret was," Ransom said many years later. That it was a secret, even to members of the group, points to the esoteric nature of their compact, and links them with the Imagists before them, and still earlier, with the French Symbolists, the original group from which all modern poetry has sprung. But it points even further, to the necessary mystery surrounding poetry in all places and times, indicating its ultimately religious source. Sydney Hirsch may have been wrong in many of his fanciful etymologies, but he was right in his primary intuition that poetry is a sacred art, an attempt always to translate the Word of God into the words of men, and he is usually credited with inventing the name, "Fugitive." What he may have meant by it remains a mystery, but was probably best explained by Tate, who put it that "A Fugitive was quite simply a Poet: the Wanderer, or even the Wandering Jew, the Outcast, the man who carries the secret wisdom of the world." The shared belief of the Fugitives that poetry was something more than a pastime or diversion, that it was truly a divine calling, gave a dimension to their work that made even the most trivial poem seem somehow to participate in the universal human experience, passing beyond the limitations of the provincial.

Besides the esoteric sense of the term "Fugitive," there was also what might be called the emergent sense: that defined by the poems themselves. It is this sense that now gives fullest meaning to the world, in the light of more than half a century of accumulated poetry. In its emergent sense, the term "Fugitive" becomes one of the prime equivalents for "modern man." For, contrary, to their desire to recover an older, communal experience of men living together on the land they loved - call it the "Old South," the "Golden Age," the "Garden of Eden," what you will - the pull of modern experience forced them to express recurrent images of isolation and alienation. The Fugitives, like other modern artists, had their Existential moments of despair, and were brought to face loneliness as a permanent human condition. It is to be found in the earliest of their poems, as in the lines of Warren's "To a Face in a Crowd":

"we must meet

As weary nomads in this desert at last,

Borne in the lost procession of these feet."

It appears again in Davidson's "Sanctuary," and even more eloquently, in his late, fine tribute, "Lines Written for Allen Tate on his Sixtieth Anniversary," which speaks of

"us, deliberate exiles, whose dry rod

Blossoms athwart the Long Street's servile rage

And tells what pilgrimage greens the Tennessee sod."

The "weary nomads" and the "deliberate exiles" are other names for the Fugitives, who could not flee from the common fate of man in this century. Most convincing of all is Warren's "Ballad of Billie Potts," a story of outlaws in western Kentucky told to him as a child, which has essentially the same plot as Albert Camus' Le Malentendu (The Misunderstood), the strange Existential drama of a murder occurring in eastern Europe. It is unlikely that Warren's poem and Camus' play have a common source, but there is not mistaking the similarity of character and theme, for both are parables of the Prodigal Son in reverse: they show that when human identity becomes lost, man becomes a prey to man, and even parents may be brought by unforeseen circumstances to murder their own child.

To stress the Existential meaning of the name "Fugitive" is only to suggest that the poetry of the modern South, like the fiction of the modern South, has been as much an expression of the age we live in as the literature of any other region. What gives Southern writing its special perspective is the sense of the distance, in time and space, between the South as a last remnant of European feudal society, with a landed gentry and a peasantry still rooted to a single spot of earth, and the largely undifferentiated mass society of the modern industrialized metropolis, with its restless and haunted multitudes. Fleeing from a vanishing culture into a relatively cultureless world, the Southern writer has experienced a profounder sense of shock than many of his contemporaries - except for those expatriate Americans like Eliot and Pound, who made the long voyage from the New World to the Old, and who lived in a different kind of exile during their distinguished and controversial careers.

-William Pratt, excerpted from his essay entitled "In Pursuit of the Fugitives" introducing The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective. J.S. Sanders and Company, Nashville: 1991.