432 Making It New: 1900–1945the disdain they felt for modern, urban culture was reflected in the pseudonyms
the leading members of the group adopted for the first two issues. Tate called himself
Henry Feathertop, John Crowe Ransom was Roger Prim, and Donald Davidson
Robert Gallivant. Names like these suggested a coterie of elegant dandies who,
like Poe, had little affection for utilitarian culture or for the sentimentality of the
moonlight-and-magnolias school of writing. And even when the pseudonyms were
dropped, the sense of distance remained: for the Fugitives, it seemed, to be conscious
of their age meant to be conscious of their isolation from it.
The Fugitive magazine lasted for three years, during which others joined the
group, notably Robert Penn Warren and Laura Riding. It never sold more than five
hundred copies, and the actual quality of the poetry published in it was not especially
high. There are, in fact, few poems produced by Fugitive writers during the Fugitive
period, apart from those of Ransom, which can be called major. Yet this little
magazine is of real importance in the story of twentieth-century American writing,
and for several reasons that suggest a resemblance with Imagism. Like the Imagist
movement, the Fugitives supplied a nursing-ground for a number of exceptional
writers. Like the Imagists, they developed together certain ideas about writing
that were to be crucial both to them individually and to many other American
writers during the century, whether directly influenced by them or not. Like the
Imagists, they progressed to other, related movements, aesthetic, social, and political,
that were to have a significant impact on the reading of literature and culture. That,
however, is about as far as the connection between the Fugitives and the Imagists
goes. In most other ways, in terms of what they believed and practiced, they offer a
profound contrast to each other: a difference that, to some extent, measures the
poles between which American literature moved in the first half of the twentieth
century. Whether seen as contrast, conflict, or dialectic, that difference maps out
much of the territory inhabited by American writing, especially during the period
from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II. It was somewhere
within that territory that most American writers of the time operated.
It was Allen Tate, in fact, who, when he was trying to explain what was special
about the Fugitive group, used their difference with Imagism as a means of definition.
“I would call the Fugitives,” he declared, “an intensive and historical group as
opposed to the eclectic and cosmopolitan groups that flourished in the East.” As far
as literature was concerned, the Imagists were experimental and internationalist.
They believed in making it new, and they saw themselves as part of a larger,
cosmopolitan cultural community. The Fugitives, by contrast, were traditionalists
and regionalists. With the occasional exception of Tate, who liked to pose as the
modernist gadfly of the group (although, as his prose and poetry show, he was not
much of a modernist in practice), they subscribed to the traditional forms, meters,
and diction. And, with the exception only of Riding, they belonged to the South:
they were born in the South, raised in the South, and – for all their attacks on the
nostalgic habits of their region – they saw themselves primarily in terms of their
“Southernness.” Nor does the contrast end there. The Imagists were, for the most
part, optimists, rationalists, creatures of the Enlightenment: believing in theGGray_c04.indd 432ray_c 04 .indd 432 8 8/1/2011 7:53:58 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 58 AM