Autobiography and Ideology in the South

BY the early I 920S, not long after the humorist H. L. Mencken JD launched an attack against the South for its cultural shortcomings, the Vanderbilt University circle had begun meeting informally in Nashville, Tennessee, to discuss poetry and Southern life. The group, sixteen in number, included Kentuckians Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren; their friend Donald Davidson; and the poet and writer under whom all three had studied as undergraduates, John Crowe Ransom. Calling themselves the Fugitives, together they founded a journal to publish their own tightly-crafted poems. They insisted upon a poetry of contradictory but carefully juxtaposed images, and in a short period of time, The Fugitive had earned a reputation for its distinctive poetry sprung from the South.1 The Vanderbilt poets extended their interest in structure and design to realms beyond the artistic. If all good poetry grew out of a reverence for form and order, Southern culture from their perspective had long ago proved itself as an object of poetic achievement. In its ideal form, the South, like a well-wrought

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• Thomas Wolfe

  Open Access•Amélie Moisy•Sillages critiques•2024

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