A Place to Come From: The Nashville Agrarians and Robert Penn Warren

APlaceto Come From: TheNashvilleAgrariansand Robert PennWarren Richard Gray,ed. Robert Penn Warren: ACollectionof Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs. NJ.:Prentice-Hall,1980.260pp. James H.Justus. The Achievement of Robert Penn iforren.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.326 + xiv pp. Neil Nakadate,ed. Robert Penn Warren: Critical Perspectives. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981.328pp. Thomas DanielYoungand John J. Hindle, eds. The Republic of Letters in America: The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate. Lexingtoni University Press ofKentucky,1981.232pp. Thomas DanielYoung. Waking Their Neighbors Up:TheNashville Agrarians Rediscoi•ered. Athens: Universityof Georgia Press, 1982.90 + xii pp. Mark Royden Winchell Historically,Americans have found the South easier to mythologize than to understand.Indeed, what is one to make of a people who are deeply conservativeand yet remain proud of having tried to overthrow the United States governmentby force and violence? Even today, one cannot drive through the Southwithout confronting rebel flags and car horns that play "Dixie" when stoppedat red lights. Although the Civil War was easily the gravest political, militaryand moral crisis ever faced by the United States, the North has long sincerelegated that crisis to the safe confines of a history text. For the South, however,the past continues to be a living part of the present. Perhaps for this reason,Southerners are a peculiarly literary people. As Garry Wills has noted: "winnerserect their own monuments, while losers ache with music_,,, Ofallof America's regions, only the West can rival the South as a symbolic landscape.The West, however, is more mirage than actual setting: it is a land whereonly the future seems real. The South, in contrast, ismore preoccupied withwhat has been than with what is to be: it isless shifting mirage than fixed myth.All that changes is the southerner's attitude toward that myth. In the opinionof Allen Tate, such a change occurred in the period between the two worldwars and gave birth to what we now call the Southern Renaissance. Prior to the First World War, Tate argues, the characteristic mode of southerndiscourse was rhetorical, but, in recent years, has become dialectical; that is, the South finally has begun to regard itself in an introspective and Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 15,Number 2, Summer 1984, 229-239 230 Mark Royden Winchell self-critical fashion. ''The South not only reentered the world with the first World War," Tate writes; "it looked around and saw for the first time since about 1830that the Yankees were not to blame for everything." 2 As Tate,s friend and fellowsoutherner Robert Penn Warren has observed, it isfrequentlv the case that a traditional and insular society which is in the process ofbeing assimilated into a larger surrounding culture will produce a tragic andelegiac literature. For a people, as for an individual, death is truly the mother ofbeautv. Central to this modern rebirth (some would say first birth) of letters inthe South were the efforts of an intellectually eclectic but spiritually homogeneous group of writers who were associated with Vanderbilt University duringthe third and fourth decades of this century. The most important membersof this group were Tate and Warren and their mentor John Crowe Ransom. Whether these men were leading a movement of neo-metaphysical poets called Fugitives or of social reactionaries called Agrarians or of avant-garde exegetes called "new critics," they were at the cutting edge of southern thought and culture during the twenties and thirties. As such, they helped permanently to change the face of American literature. In Waking Their Neighbors Up, his illuminating collection of Lamar Memorial Lectures. Vanderbilt Professor Thomas Daniel Young attempts to assess the contemporary significance of the Agrarians' critique of industrialism . To this task he brings the gifts of a literary historian, classical rhetorician and perceptive observer of present-day American culture. By reexamining this quixotic yet eerily prophetic movement of the thirties, Young sheds a good deal of light on the conflict between southern traditionalism and what Agrarian Lyle Lanier calls the philosophy of progress. 3 Throughout the early 1920s, the Nashville group was primarily interested in forging new directions in poetry and remained relatively indifferent to social and economic issues. Indeed, Ransom had even declared...