Vanderbilt and Beyond: The Legacy of the Fugitives

The Fugitive Legacy: A Critical History. By Charlotte H. Beck. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. xii + 303 pp. $49.95.

World of Relations: The Achievement of Peter Taylor. By David N. Robinson. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1998. xii + 209 pp. $29.95.

That the Fugitive poets at Vanderbilt University had a deep and profound influence on American letters is amply and authoritatively demonstrated by Charlotte H. Beck in her fine study The Fugitive Legacy: A Critical History, a book on which she faithfully and meticulously worked for more than two decades. As she tells the story, what began as a local and regional movement in Nashville with the publication of The Fugitive poetry magazine in 1922 soon became a national phenomenon, and its primary instruments were the university classroom and the subsidized academic literary quarterly. (Some day a history will be written about the importance of the academy in American literature as a central patron and secure abode for the majority of our poets and creative writers.)

The primary figure and teacher was John Crowe Ransom, who came to Vanderbilt as an instructor in English in 1914, soon to be joined by Donald Davidson, at first a student and after 1920 a fellow faculty member. Their shared passion for poetry was widened to include several younger students, such as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Andrew Lytle, although their magazine The Fugitive would eventually reach out to a national circle of poets and include among its contributors Hart Crane, John Gould Fletcher, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding. In their gatherings, the young poets passed around, read aloud, commented on, and borrowed from each other's work, establishing a pattern of collaboration that would last a lifetime. They were also developing through their close analytic scrutiny the seeds of what would become the New Criticism, although Beck rightly locates its origins as well in the practices of Methodist ministers of the time whose sermons were based on careful rhetorical and semantic explications of biblical phrases and texts (both Ransom and Cleanth Brooks were sons of Methodist clergymen and undoubtedly heard many such sermons).

As the members of the group graduated and moved on to other institutions to study or teach, they soon picked up new student followers, mentored them into artistic maturity, published them in quarterlies they edited or established, and encouraged contacts with numerous other writers through friendship and correspondence. On the surface, this may appear to be simply an "old boys" (and sometimes "girls") network functioning to get each other into print, but it was not a matter of merely doing each other favors. Indeed they subjected each other's work to the severest kind of criticism, requested extensive revision, and as often as not rejected it out of hand. The quarterlies they edited--The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, and Hound and Horn among them--set new standards for American poetry, fiction, and criticism, and with such success that the writers found it easier to gain entrance to the high-paying prestigious publications where they had no personal influence, such as The New Yorker, Harper's, Scribner's, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, and Esquire. A roster of the names who emerged from this collaborative network also dispels any notion of cronyism at work: Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Andrew Lytle, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and Flannery
O'Connor. Then there were the people they in turn tutored or influenced, like James Dickey, Jesse Hill Ford, Elizabeth Spencer, Walter Sullivan, Madison Jones, Edwin Godsey, and Robert Drake, as well as such critics as Cleanth Brooks, Lewis P. Simpson, Thomas Daniel Young, Louise Cowan, and Ashley Brown.

Regarding Dan Young, Beck appears to accept literally a facetious fabrication by Louis D. Rubin when she reports, "As a Vanderbilt graduate student, Young made the Fugitives his major interest. Thereafter, . . . Young produced an impressive catalog of scholarly books on...