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31 Chapter 3 From the New Humanism to Agrarianism During the fall of 1928, author and native Kentuckian Allen Tate set sail for Europe under the auspices of a Guggenheim fellowship. For Tate and other aspiring artists, the twenties had been an era filled with possibilities and uncertainties . Emerging from the terrors of the Great War, the decade ushered in revolutions in finance, transportation, and communication that drastically altered the American social and cultural landscape. Unbeknownst to Tate during his voyage, the world of the roaring twenties was on the verge of a calamitous global economic depression and the ascendance of totalitarianism in Italy and Germany.At the age of twenty-nine, Tate was an accomplished scholar and had been among the youngest members of the Fugitive poetry circle in Nashville, Tennessee. In his fellowship application, Tate had emphasized his association with The Fugitive magazine, which he deemed “one of the most important literary forces in recent years.” Writing in the third person, Tate styled himself as a self-educated independent writer who had “never been employed by an institution.” Moreover, Tate insisted that he loathed the “reputation of a specialist ,” and that, above all else, he “wished to be considered a man of letters.”1 Accompanied by his wife, Caroline Gordon, Tate made his way to London where he was formally introduced to T. S. Eliot at a gathering of writers affiliated with the Criterion. As editor, Eliot had generously published the views of the New Humanists, but now sought to enlist critics who opposed them. In Tate, he found an anxious and willing ally. Born in Winchester, Kentucky, in 1899, John Orley Allen Tate was educated at private schools and at Vanderbilt University. Founded in 1873 in Nashville, Vanderbilt was the brainchild of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, a northern philanthropist, who hoped that a properly endowed southern university would strengthen what he viewed as “the ties which should exist between all 32 Superfluous Southerners sections of our common country.”2 In many regards, the university was a potent symbol of New South boosterism in a city that was barely over a decade removed from the ravages of the Civil War. During the early twentieth century ,Vanderbilt emerged as an appealing alternative to the region’s young men, like Tate, who ordinarily attended northern colleges. Consequently, during the twenties, Vanderbilt emerged as the academic hub for one of the most vibrant literary movements in American history. In many regards, the Fugitive poets were, like Vanderbilt itself, founded upon the historical confluence of the“Old” and the “New” South. Along with John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson, Tate, as he duly noted in his fellowship application, was among the principal members of the Fugitive circle. Much like the New Humanists, the Fugitives abhorred romanticism , but supplanted the New Humanist rebuke of Rousseau with disdain for the romantic inclinations of what they called the “high-caste Brahmins of the Old South.”3 Tate had, from its inception in 1922, been among the youngest and most dynamic contributors to The Fugitive. His innovative verse was, to a large extent, the result of his acquaintance with T. S. Eliot’s poetry and prose. Captivated by Eliot’s unconventional style and his realism, Tate once affirmed that Eliot “goes straight to the real thing; this is of course his ‘modernity’ and I am with him.”4 Eliot’s modernist aesthetic galvanized Tate’s poetic imagination and Eliot’s epic poem, The Waste Land, became a principal inspiration for Tate’s poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” In similar fashion, Eliot’s realist criticism shaped Tate’s critical imagination. He was especially taken with Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which admonished the romantic tendencies of late nineteenth-century poetry with its insistence that, rather than a “turning loose of emotion,”poetry mandated an“escape from emotion.”5 Most significantly, Eliot’s conservative notion that tradition “cannot be inherited”; that it can only be obtained “by great labour,” particularly stirred his southern protégé.6 During the twenties, Tate waged what he subsequently called an “impertinent campaign in Eliot’s behalf in the South.”7 As an aspiring culture warrior, Tate was particularly stirred by Eliot’s critique of the New Humanism and, at Eliot’s urging, Tate began work on his own indictment of the movement. In the summer of 1929, Tate’s essay “The Fallacy of Humanism,” was featured in the Criterion. In his opening paragraph, Tate charged that Humanism lacked a “medium...

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