Neo-Confederates take their stand: Southern Agrarians and the Civil War

Ninety years ago, a group of twelve Southern intellectuals published I’ll Take My Stand, a manifesto dedicated to reviving Southern values and ideals in direct opposition to Northern industrialism and philosophy. Ever since 1930, the Southern Agrarians have been frequently presented as critics of modern life, but this kind of focus overshadows another way in which they were described in those early days: as neo-Confederates. The Agrarians’ ongoing and wide-ranging engagement with the Civil War ‐ especially in the work of Allen Tate and Donald Davidson ‐ was, I argue, hugely significant for the planning and writing of the manifesto. Examining the ways in which these writers used the war also shows how they sought to retard modernist progress, embrace failure as an element of Lost Cause ideology, and distort the temporal shape of Civil War memory. Furthermore, I show here how bound up in the manifesto and related writing by its contributors is a commitment to white supremacy and violence ‐ a kind of fanatical dedication that speaks to events in the United States today.

Joseph Frank

Joseph Frank (1918–2013) achieved fame as a literary scholar first with his three-part essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945) and then with his five-volume critical biography Dostoevsky (1976–2002). This essay traces his career, emphasizing its divergence from the practices both of New Criticism at its start and of the theory movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and noting the crucial role played by Allen Tate and the Sewanee Review. Unfashionable independence, fidelity to personal fascination, and unremitting effort all play a role in scholarly accomplishment.

Kenneth Burke and the New Critics

Most scholars of American theorist Kenneth Burke consider him a founder of the post-war New Rhetoric, a movement to shift rhetorical studies from a historic focus on persuasion to a more expansive understanding of language, dialogue, and communally constructed truths. However, Burke throughout the 1930s and 40s thought of himself primarily as a literary critic, albeit one who turned literary critical techniques to the social scene around him. Without his ongoing, often contentious dialogue with the literary scholars of the New Criticism, Burke’s rhetorical theories on the power of language to answer questions of human motivations may well have never materialized. New Criticism and New Rhetoric, therefore, forged each other in the crucible of the mid-century years of depression and war and the intellectual ferment they generated. It was Burke’s attempts to explain himself to these literary critics and exhort them to turn their critical lens to the world around them that provided the methodology for his action-analysis of the socio-political world. In this article I examine three of these contentious relationships—with Allen Tate prior to World War II, with John Crowe Ransom during the war, and with René Wellek following it. Their debates and congruences led Burke to formulate his purposely ambiguous understanding of hierarchies and norms that constitute what he termed the “wrangle” of parliamentary debate— a constitutive rhetoric that continues to drive international relations today.

‘Influence poetry once more’: Allen Tate and Milton's ‘Lycidas’

The standard narrative of the Milton Controversy in the early twentieth century has frequently regarded the New Criticism as part of the modernist antipathy towards Milton, which was fostered by articles such as F. R. Leavis's ‘Milton's Verse’ (1933) and T. S. Eliot's ‘A Note on the Verse of John Milton’ (1935). This essay challenges such depictions of two prominent New Critics – Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom – as inveterately hostile to Milton, arguing instead that he occupies a significant place in their poetry and criticism. By also considering these American writers’ debts to Milton as a context in which to situate the early work of a British poet deeply influenced by them, Geoffrey Hill, the essay opens up new perspectives on Milton's transatlantic reception in the mid-century and his importance to modernist poetics.

John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom (b. 30 April 1888–d. 3 July 1974) was an American poet, Southern Agrarian, literary critic, and editor of the Kenyon Review, arguably the most influential “little magazine” of the mid-20th century. Educated at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Ransom began writing poetry as a member of the Fugitive group that included Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren and had its own short-lived magazine in the early 1920s. Most of the poems on which his reputation rests—often on love or death, never long, sometimes quirky, and with intermittent archaic wording—are to be found in Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Ransom won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1951 and the National Book Award for his Selected Poems in 1964. Following their Fugitive period, Ransom and his associates moved on to become Agrarians, arguing in their 1930 I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition that the South’s distinctive characteristic was its agrarian culture, separating it from both the capitalist industrial North and Soviet Communism. As an English professor at Vanderbilt where historical studies of literary texts took precedence, Ransom argued and eventually won the cause of the literary critic, a victory that over time changed the hierarchies in the profession at large. The text itself, its structures and images and their complex interrelationship, was what was most important. His 1941 volume of theoretical essays, The New Criticism, made Ransom the quasi founding father—there were many others—of a movement that would dominate the academy for the next three decades. Always fascinated by, but wary of, the sciences as their place within the university increased exponentially, Ransom sought over and over to define the kind of supplementary but equally essential knowledge that poetry offered. As founding editor of the Kenyon Review in 1939 and director of the Kenyon School of English, Ransom exercised enormous influence on both the teaching of literature at American colleges and universities, and on several emerging poets and novelists, most notably Robert Lowell. By the mid-1960s, however, many of Ransom’s critical and social positions had come under challenge, as has his status as a “major minor poet” in several recent critiques. Nevertheless, current studies are also finding overlooked fissures in his poems, and, in the age of digitized textuality, fresh inspiration in his Agrarian and New Critical forays.

Warren, Robert Penn (1905–1989)

Robert Penn Warren was a renowned poet, novelist, critic and educator. He matriculated to Vanderbilt University in 1921, where, with Allen Tate (1899–1979) and John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), he became part of The Fugitives, a group of poets named for the journal they published. Warren earned a master’s degree at the University of California and accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to study at New College, Oxford University. Here, he began to pursue the close readings of literary texts that eventually became associated with New Criticism: a focus on the text itself without reference to the biography of the writer or the historical circumstances of the text’s composition or reception.

Allen Tate's Agrarianism: a Defense of Allegiance

Allen Tate (1899-1979) was born in Kentucky .As a Southerner he was unwilling to be like his people who were unaware of their imperfections. He realized that lack of belief in tradition which was the illness of the modern mind. It turned life to hell with a variety of tortures. Hence his agrarianism was a call to the Southerners to retreat to their tradition.It was a revolt against industrialism as an enslaving power, a destroyer threatening the very existence of human society. His agrarianism proved to be an image of life man should desire, a life imbued with tradition and belief; tradition in its historical and religious sense shapes the spirit of protest in his poetry. It is a protest against the kind of life modern man attached himself to, which dehumanized him resulting in spiritual fragmentation. Tate did what none of his fellow Agrarians attempted, to turn Agrarian concerns inward, a quest for identity , for spiritual roots and affirmation. This is what makes his agrarianism a defense of personal allegiance, besides its historical , social and religious implications.