438 Making It New: 1900–1945alternative to the plight of the person remembering them. The voice of “Antique
Harvesters,” however, is the voice of all Ransom’s poems: accomplished, witty,
serene – the voice of someone who can, apparently, fathom and perform his nature.
The voice of “Ode,” by contrast, is uncertain, feverish, disoriented – the voice of the
“locked-in ego” as Tate puts it elsewhere, of a man unable to liberate himself from a
sense of his own impotence and fragmentation. The narrator of Ransom’s poem
remains triumphantly detached, sometimes helping to gauge the failure of his
subjects and sometimes, as in “Antique Harvesters,” helping to endow his subjects’
achievements with articulate shape. The narrator of the “Ode,” however, is like the
narrator of most of Tate’s poetry and fiction: a person obsessed with his failure to
attain unity of being, whose introversions, tortured idiom, clotted imagery, and
convoluted syntax register what Tate has called “the modern squirrel cage of our
sensibility, the extreme introspection of our time.”
Tate’s search for a traditional order, with its associated idea of wholeness of being,
eventually led him away from the South and into religious faith. From the first, he
had been a little skeptical about the claims of his region: even at its finest, before the
Civil War, it was, he declared, “a feudal society without a feudal religion” and to that
extent was fatally incomplete. And he gradually turned, for the promise of moral
unity, to the Roman Catholic Church. Out of the actual process of conversion
came poems like “Seasons of the Soul,” a powerful and often pained sequence that
ends with a prayer to a mysterious “mother of silences” who, recalling both the
“Lady of Silences” in Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” and Baudelaire’s “maîtresse de
maîtresses,” seems to combine intimations of the spiritual and the sensual, the Virgin
Mary and the carnal knowledge that concludes in death. After the conversion, in
turn, came poems like “The Swimmers.” Relaxed, fluent, idiomatic, although capable
of allusion and even moments of apocalypse, such poems reveal a new willingness
to submit to the material rather than force it into a new mold – and, in particular, to
submit to the sanctions of memory and the compulsions of personality. Tate was
neither the first nor the last writer to feel that ultimate salvation for the traditionalist
was to be found in religion. This, in turn, enabled him to relax his tone and recall the
more personal details of his past life, “the shrill companions” of his youth, and to
rehearse intimate experience, moments of affection.
The paths of the two other notable Fugitive writers, Donald Davidson (1893–1968)
and Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989), were different from those of Ransom and
Tate, and different from each other. Davidson’s is the simpler case. Uppermost in the
minds of the Fugitive group, Davidson later claimed, “was a feeling of intense disgust
with the spiritual disorder of modern life.” “We wanted a life which through its own
conditions ... would engender ... order, leisure, character, stability,” he explained.
“What history told us of the South drove us straight to its traditions.” Partially true
of other Fugitive writers, this is almost entirely true of Davidson himself. Disgust
with the present precipitated a turning in on the past. Revulsion from the “ mechanical
age,” and the myriad random impressions with which “the modern brain” is
assaulted, led Davidson to celebrate the security and the splendor of the Southern
tradition, in poems gathered together in such volumes as The Tall Men (1927),GGray_c04.indd 438ray_c 04 .indd 438 8 8/1/2011 7:53:58 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 58 AM