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108 Conclusion The Southern Man of Letters in the Postmodern World “The man of letters,”the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire declared, is first and foremost the “world’s enemy.” Of course, the immediate question, in view of the story of the Agrarians and their intellectual descendants , remains to what degree this adversarial disposition remains relevant within the confines of a perpetually globalizing postmodern world? Though a unique product of the then-present age, the man of letters, Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1841, was a “heroic” figure who, in his capacity to reassert that “the spiritual always determines the material,” was uniquely suited to challenge the modern ascendancy of science and democracy. Consequently, the man of letters, Carlyle declared, “must be regarded as our most important modern person” and as a surrogate for “Prophets” and “Priests.”1 Carlyle’s invocation was, by all accounts, a tall order for the man of letters in the mid-nineteenth century, but represented an even greater undertaking for anyone who aspired to the role in the ever more secularized and democratized twentieth century . For this reason, the increasingly burdensome task of the man of letters , Lewis Simpson rightfully maintained, is best observed in the American context and is, furthermore, most palpable in the American South where a premodern slave society, vanquished by the modern forces of science and democracy during the middle of the nineteenth century, rejoined the world during the early twentieth century with a burst of cultural creativity known as the Southern Literary Renaissance. “With the war of 1914–1918,” Allen Tate illustriously declared, “the South [had] re-entered the world—but gave a backwards glance as it stepped over the border” and, as it did so, its men of letters furnished a “literature conscious of the past in the present.”2 Of course, in light of the late twentieth-century saga of Mel Bradford, one is left The Southern Man of Letters in the Postmodern World 109 to consider to what extent and ultimate effect did the Agrarians and their culturally conservative intellectual descendants fulfill the mandate of the man of letters in the modern world. While undoubtedly inspired, at least in part, by Carlyle, Tate’s realm of pure literary possibility was, at least circuitously, also informed by Karl Marx’s dictum that “all that is solid melts into air.” Indeed, along these very same lines, Donald Davidson cautioned Tate, in 1927, that his friend’s poetry and criticism were “so astringent” that it “bites and dissolves what it touches.”3 To a firmer degree than his fellow Fugitive-Agrarian, Davidson sensed that, to an overwhelming extent, the climate of modernity favored gnostic pragmatic designs for recreating the world anew over conservative attempts to imagine a dissolving past. Culturally speaking, modernity abetted a prevailing condition whereby want and dread of pure possibility were, in many respects, instantaneously interchangeable. During the late nineteenth century, northern intellectuals, historian Jackson Lears notes, were, as a consequence of their confrontation with modernity, left with “no place of grace.”4 Prominent among them was, of course, Henry Adams, who was consigned to label himself a Conservative Christian Anarchist and who, unable to reconcile the Virgin and dynamo, memorably referred to himself in the third person in The Education. However defeatist, Adams’s encounter with the acids of modernity nonetheless furnished a framework for the conservative anti-modernism of, among others, the New Humanists and the Nashville Agrarians during the twentieth century. The difficulty, with which Adams and Tate wrestled, was the often interchangeable sense of dread and pure possibility which animated the modern man of letters’ journey amongst the realms of literature, politics and religion. In this regard, it is useful to revisit Tate’s 1954 confession to Andrew Lytle that the Agrarians, in their failure to understand the theological implications of their errand, had mistakenly “made the South, and especially the Old South an object of idolatry.”5 In hindsight, Tate’s remarkable admission, which extended to the claim that it was nonetheless“better to be an idolater than worship nothing ,”was the culmination of a quarter century of inward disquietude regarding the compatibility of Agrarianism, the realm of letters, and religious faith.6 At the same time, Tate, despite his dismissal of Agrarianism as idolatrous and his mid-century conversion to Catholicism, remained troubled by the perennial irreconcilability of his literary and religious selves. In fact, less than two years before confessing Agrarianism’s shortcomings to Lytle, Tate, in an equally confessional...

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