Fugitives (poets)

Works Discussed in This Essay

• "Alf Burt, Tenant Farmer" by Robert Penn Warren
• "Blue Girls" by John Crowe Ransom
• "Day" by Allen Tate
• "Dusk" by Allen Tate
• "Euthanasia" by Allen Tate
• "For a Dead Citizen" by Allen Tate
• "Iron Beach" by Robert Penn Warren
• "Janet Waking" by John Crowe Ransom
• "The Moon" by Robert Penn Warren
• "Piazza Piece" by John Crowe Ransom
• "Redivivius" by Donald Davidson
• "The Swinging Bridge" by Donald Davidson
• "To a Prodigal Old Maid" by Allen Tate
• "The Wolf" by Donald Davidson

The Fugitives were a group of initially amateur poets who, in the years just before World War I, began meeting informally in Nashville, Tennessee, to discuss philosophy, literature, and their own poems. Many participants were affiliated with Vanderbilt University, either as students or as faculty members. Although the war initially disrupted their group, after the conflict ended the meetings resumed, becoming less like friendly get-togethers and more like a professional writers' workshop. Most of the participants were young men who took poetry and the role of the poet very seriously. They offered detailed critiques of each other's poems and eventually decided, in 1922, to publish a "little magazine" of the sort that flourished in this period. They called it the Fugitive, explaining the title by saying that they were fleeing from the hidebound traditions of upper-class southern culture, which tended toward Romanticism. The term "fugitive" also suggested the ideal of the poet as a wandering free spirit, committed to art and the wisdom poets could offer.

Sixteen men were initially involved in the effort. After discussing each other's poems, they would vote to determine which poems were good enough to be published. Eventually they also accepted submissions from poets outside the group. The Fugitives themselves were never monolithic. They prided themselves on the breadth of their interests and tastes, and they often disagreed about particular kinds of writing and particular specific poems. One subject of disagreement, which caused increasing tension, was just how "modern" their poetry should be—just how much it should reject previous ways of thinking, styles of writing, and traditions of form and meter. Although most of the Fugitives regarded themselves as deliberate innovators, in retrospect their work seems less wildly revolutionary than much of the other writing often associated with the literary modernism that preceded and followed World War I. The Fugitives disagreed, for instance, about T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, published in 1922 and often considered the major work of literary modernism. With its extremely unconventional form and phrasing, it represents the kind of writing that some of the Fugitives greatly admired but that others were strongly against.

To the degree that the Fugitives did share common literary tastes, those tastes involved rejecting poetic sentimentality, social pretense, upper-class snobbery, and predetermined restrictions of style, form, and subject matter. Instead, they tended to emphasize irony, craftsmanship, intelligence, subtle allusions, literary experimentalism, sometimes-unconventional phrasing, and a commitment to the traditional values of European civilization, especially the values associated with Europe in the Middle Ages. The Fugitive poets were well read in both the ancient classics and the latest examples of cutting-edge modernism. They did not write for the masses or to achieve widespread popularity; instead, they wrote poetry designed to appeal to intelligent readers who, like themselves, valued literary excellence. They wanted to unite the best of the past with the best of the present, and they rejected anything clichéd and predictable. They valued the role of reason, not merely emotion, in writing and reading, which contributed to their skepticism of Romantics and Romanticism. Although admiring the traditional culture of the South, they bristled at the idea that the South was the only subject they could write about or that there was a single "southern style." Their poems are often preoccupied with themes of loss, change, and especially death, and unlike many other modernists they tended to prefer rhyme, regular meters, and traditional stanza forms. Some of the Fugitives used arcane, unusual words and elliptical phrasing that can occasionally make their poems difficult to understand. This is especially true of the poetry of Allen Tate, the most self-consciously modernist writer of the group.

In addition to Tate, the poets usually considered the most noteworthy of the Fugitives are John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren. Tate and Ransom often disagreed about the more extreme forms of modernist writing, but Ransom, the oldest and most experienced writer of the group, set the tone for most of the other Fugitives. Whereas Tate admired Eliot's The Waste Land, Ransom and various other Fugitives had their doubts. Still, the Fugitives typically respected each other's opinions and were self-consciously catholic in their tastes. When their magazine ceased publication in 1925, its founders were still good friends. Some of them went on to join the Southern Agrarians, who saw themselves as self-conscious dissenters from modern scientific industrialism and self-conscious defenders of traditional southern values and the agricultural society from which those values grew.

John Crowe Ransom was the "senior" Fugitive by virtue of his age, his poetic experience, and his academic rank. A wry, courtly man who taught English at Vanderbilt, Ransom had a talent for a particular kind of dry, ironic, and understated poetry. His verse is far less stridently modern than Tate's, often displaying a subtly sarcastic sense of humor and a sense of amusement at human foolishness and the limits of human perspectives. Some of his most famous poems are about young people, including children, who have not yet learned the inevitable lessons of mutability and mortality. In "Janet Waking," for instance, first published in the Fugitive and later revised, a little girl awakes from sleep, briefly kisses her mother and father (but not her brother), and then rushes to check on her beloved pet chicken, an old hen incongruously named Chucky. She finds Chucky dead, the victim (in typically wry, inventive, arcane Fugitive phrasing) of a "transmogrifying bee" (line 13) who stung "Chucky's old bald head" (14):

And purply did the knot

Swell with the venom and communicate

Its rigor! Now the poor comb stood up straight

But Chucky did not. (17–20)

This poem is typical of Ransom: it manages to combine a deliberately unsentimental joke about Chucky's death with real tenderness for the little girl who deeply mourns her passing. As the poem ends, she is weeping over the dead hen and "would not be instructed in how deep / Was the forgetful kingdom of death" (27–28).

Even more ominous is "Blue Girls," first published as a much longer poem in the Fugitive but later tightened into one of Ransom's most memorable texts. The poem's speaker watches as a group of young women, dressed in blue, go chattering across their campus. They are full of youth, vitality, self-absorption, and just a bit of vanity. They resemble bluebirds, preoccupied with present joys and not thinking about "what will come to pass" (6). That unspecified "what," of course, refers to change, loss, and eventual death. The speaker offers the girls Ransom's typical advice:

Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;

And I will cry with my loud lips and publish

Beauty which all our power shall never establish,

It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;

I know a lady with a terrible tongue,

Blear eyes fallen from blue,

All her perfections tarnished—yet it is not long

Since she was lovelier than any of you. (9–17)

That last line carries an ironic sting. The speaker reminds the girls, and his readers, of the inevitable transience of human beauty and, eventually, of human life.

More tender but equally ominous is Ransom's poem "Piazza Piece," in which "a gentleman in a dustcoat" (1), surely a personification of death, tries to make a young woman understand that he has come (or is coming) for her. She, of course, would rather listen to "the young men's whispering and sighing" (4), but the gentleman "must have [his] lovely lady soon" (7). The woman prefers to wait for her true love to come so they can kiss, but in the poem's final two lines, she notices the presence of the gentleman and reacts much like a stereotypical horrified southern belle: "Back from my trellis, Sir, before I scream! / I am a lady young in beauty waiting" (13–14). Although she waits for her love, Ransom clearly implies that it is death that will ultimately have her.

Allen Tate was eleven years younger than Ransom, who had been his teacher. He was well read, intellectually curious, intellectually confident, and often combative in expressing his unconventional views. Tate, although steeped in the classics, deeply admired the challenging, innovative works of such modernists as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hart Crane. His own writings for the Fugitive, usually republished later in revised form, were among the most deliberately difficult and unconventional works the magazine ever printed. Often his phrasing is intentionally shocking or arcane, and there is a dark, almost Gothic strain to much of his writing, likely due in part to his great admiration for Edgar Allan Poe. Tate was definitely not writing for the masses, a fact that makes many of his poems difficult to comprehend. His poem "Euthanasia," for instance, not only alludes to death in the title but also begins with a line typical of Tate's style: "No more the white refulgent streets" (1). Already the phrasing is arcane, and the language becomes even more outlandish when the speaker observes that the "graceless madness" (5) of a woman's lips cannot "rouge" a corpse's "cheeks nor warm / His cold corpuscles back to strife" (7–8). Gone is the gentle irony of Ransom; Tate more often wants to catch his readers completely by surprise.

In contrast, another poem by Tate, titled "To a Prodigal Old Maid," is far less shocking and far more in the style of Ransom. Again the theme of mutability is stressed—the Fugitives, although mostly young men, were obsessed with aging and death—but the language here is much more accessible. Still, the complex syntax often found in Tate's writing is heard just a bit in the opening stanza, particularly the last two lines:

Sing now no hymn nor chant a dirge

Nor weep for any dead thing,

Still in her veins an ardent sting

Her beating blood can urge. (1–4)

The old, or at least aging, spinster of this poem is said in the final stanza to be "dream[ing] of a springtime gentleman / To have come a springtime since" (15–16). Whether the young gentleman really existed or is merely a figment of her own imagination is left unclear by the unusual syntax of the phrase "to have come." Tate may here be mocking a conventional figure of southern writing, or he may simply be offering his own version of that figure.

In a very brief poem titled "Day," comprising just two stanzas of three lines each, Tate returns to his more usual (that is, deliberately unusual) style. The opening image of a "chariot / Riding the cold stars to death" (1–2) is in keeping with the preoccupation with death found in many other Fugitive poems, but the form of Tate's poem stands out from those of his fellows. Here he abandons rhyme, standard punctuation, predictable meter, and predictable line length—especially in the final line, which consists of just three one-syllable words. He opens by describing the chariot as "strict" (1), an unexpected adjective in this context, and then plays on the ancient idea of the sun moving through the skies in a chariot before, in a surprising shift, likening the sun to "an 18th Century Lady" (3). Perhaps most shocking of all the phrasing here is the use of the word "sphincters" in the second stanza: "For, the easy sphincters / Of your eye quiver . . ." (4–5). Although the term is anatomically accurate, referring as it does to any circular muscle that constricts and relaxes—including the pupillary sphincter, which controls constriction of the pupil—its associations are such that its presence in the poem is jarring. Ransom would probably not have used such a word in this context, if any. However, phrasing of this sort was one of Tate's specialties. Though "Day" is unorthodox in its construction, it is more conventional still than its companion poem, "Dusk," which opens with the following lines:

Day hot in the terror of her head

Rots on a weak hill,

Span trees web the lank clouds

Slowly spill. (1–4)

This kind of phrasing and form appears far less often, if at all, in the writings of the other major Fugitives. But Tate could also write in ways that were far more immediately comprehensible and powerful, as in the memorable poem "For a Dead Citizen." Although the title invokes the standard Fugitive theme of death, the poem itself satirizes the titular citizen as shallow, unthinking, happy, highly esteemed, and well dressed. A stray phrase suggests that he may have been unfaithful to the "pretty wife," who seems merely "sad" (12) at his passing. In the final lines, however, Tate comes in for the kill:

There at the church they took him through the door,

His sweet wide mouth much as it was before,

And some said, bitterly bitterly wept his whore. (16–18)

With that final word, Tate twists the knife. "For a Dead Citizen" shows how powerful his more traditional poems could often be.

Although Donald Davidson was a few years older than Tate, the friendship between the two was especially close. They exchanged long, detailed letters offering exceptionally honest commentary on each other's writings. Davidson was the more traditional of the two poets, but he took Tate's opinions seriously and was open to Tate's ideas about literary modernism. Ultimately, Davidson was perhaps the most consistently accessible of the major Fugitive writers. This accessibility is evident, for instance, in the opening lines of "The Swinging Bridge," first published in the Fugitive and then later included, in revised form, in Davidson's collection The Long Street (1961). The revised version opens as follows:

Not arching up as good stone bridges do,

Nor glum and straight like common iron things,

But marvelously adroop between two trees

Trembling at even the softest step, it swings

To span the summer's long, long wish and a lazy creek's vagaries.

A boy (I know him well) has crept up there

Through the smooth willow's crotch and footed the wire,

Tiptoe where ancient planks have rotted through

And gone, like folks who have followed old desire

Into some heaven and long, long fallen asleep where they wanted to. (1–10)

This is an unusually cheerful Fugitive poem, a celebration of the pleasures of the speaker's boyhood. It implies, as Davidson's poems often do, a contrast between the joys of the past and the disappointments of the present (symbolized here by the "glum," "straight," "iron" bridge of the second line). Nothing about this poem is confusing; nothing is satirical or grim or especially ironic. Tate and Davidson were friends, but they, like all the Fugitives, had their own individual opinions, preferences, and styles and ultimately respected each other's individuality.

Sometimes Davidson can sound like Tate, as in his poem "Redivivus." Here, in the last stanza, the speaker closes by imagining how his paradoxically named "skeleton soul" (13) might someday "[w]rithe upward from its loam, / Drink red morning again, / And look gently home" (14–16) The terms "skeleton soul," "writhe," and "red morning" all resemble Tate's phrasing, but the final line is pure Davidson. Likewise, a satirical tone similar to that of much Fugitive writing in general, and of Tate's writing in particular, can be seen in Davidson's poem "The Wolf," which compares a materialistic, greedy small-town shop owner to a beast of prey. Some of the opening stanza's diction sounds particularly reminiscent of Tate, especially when the speaker darkly describes how the shop owner "jingles furtive fingers through the till, / Dropping delicious coins with snap and grin" (3–4). On the whole, however, Davidson can often be more plainly, simply lyrical than both Tate and Ransom. Partly for this reason, he never achieved the prominence of the other two, nor of the youngest Fugitive of them all, Robert Penn Warren.

Robert Penn Warren first met (and hugely impressed) the other Fugitives while he was still a teenager studying at Vanderbilt. Bored with chemistry and in love with literature, Warren eventually became the most widely popular and most conspicuously honored of all the group's members. Although his most mature work as a poet would come after the Fugitive had ceased publication, he was increasingly well represented in its final issues. Sometimes he wrote poems that sound like those of Tate, whose ideas he often shared. Thus, "Iron Beach," first published in the Fugitive and later revised, opens by declaring, "Beyond this bitter shore there is no going, / This iron beach, this tattered verge of land" (1–2). Here is the sort of grim, dark pessimism often found in Tate's works, seen again in the last line of the poem, which describes how "[t]he arctic summer brings the carrion gull" (14). Also reminiscent of Tate is Warren's poem "The Moon," featuring the grotesque image of a "clock / With slavering fangs" (9–10) that "like the haggard dog / Harried the minutes in a desperate flock" (10–11).

Yet Warren could also write beautiful, almost rapturous poems. One such poem is "Alf Burt, Tenant Farmer," which describes how an old farmer one day fails to awake from sleep and leaves unfinished his difficult work. The poem raises the possibility that Burt has been taken up into a glorious heaven to "reap perhaps in field where he is gone— / Harvest of farmlands fairer than our own" (6–7). In these farmlands, the speaker muses, "There will the plowshare never bite the stone, // Never will blight fall on the yellow pear, / Nor flood and wind defy the weary hand" (8–10). Warren writes of this possibility at such length and with such strong emotion that it begins to sound momentarily credible. But then, in typical Fugitive fashion, irony undercuts the ecstasy: perhaps dead Alf, after all, will simply occupy "[t]he steadfast earth of a narrow grave" (18). But at least, if this is the case, "in that sleep where all things are the same / No dream can fall to stir him to remember / Thistle and drouth and the crops that never came" (22–24) Even plain death can thus bring a kind of peace—the kind of peace Tate, of all the Fugitives, could rarely imagine.

Bibliography

Claridge, Henry. "Fugitives and Agrarians." Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, edited by Eric L. Haralson, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001, pp. 234–37.

Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Louisiana State UP, 1959.

Davidson, Donald. Poems, 1922–1961. U of Minnesota P, 1966.

Davis, Donald A. "Fugitive/Agrarian School." The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, edited by Burt Kimmelman, Facts on File, 2005, pp. 174–76.

Pratt, William, editor. The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective. 1965. J. S. Sanders, 1991.

Ransom, John Crowe. The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom. Edited by Ben Mazer, Un-Gyve Press, 2015.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets and the South. Louisiana State UP, 1978.

Tate, Allen. Collected Poems, 1919–1976. 1977. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Warren, Robert Penn. The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. Edited by John Burt, Louisiana State UP, 1998.