434 Making It New: 1900–1945this, a conviction that the best kind of social order is one “in which agriculture is
the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige.”
The Agrarian reformulation of those pastoral and regionalist impulses recurrent
in American writing is important to the literary and cultural history of the nation.
As a social program, however, it had just about no impact. Gradually, the individual
Agrarians drifted away to pursue other interests. Several of them, however, continued
to share a residual commitment not only to the South, the past, and the rural
community, but to the promotion of a close, critical reading of literature, which was
to become known as the New Criticism. As author of The New Criticism (1941),
Ransom gave the new critical movement its name; as a prolific essayist, as Essays
of Four Decades (1969) and The House of Fiction (written with Caroline Gordon
(1895–1981) (1950)) both attest, Tate gave it intellectual muscle; as the authors
of the immensely popular and influential Understanding Poetry (1938) and
Understanding Fiction (1943), Warren and the critic Cleanth Brooks were largely
responsible for making the New Criticism the standard practice in American schools
and colleges for three or four decades after World War II. There are many things that
could be said about the New Criticism. It encouraged close reading of a text,
separated from discussion of historical, biographical, or other contexts. It steered
attention toward certain specific literary practices, such as the use of symbol, wit,
and irony. It was promoted by other eminent critics and writers of the time, many of
them from the North and some of them liberal. In its Southern manifestation,
though, the New Criticism did have the additional advantage of allowing former
Fugitives and Agrarians to retain some of their cherished principles. What people
like Ransom and Tate were seeking for in works of literature, as New Critics, was
what they had once sought for in social and historical institutions: a harmonious
system, an organism in which there was a place for everything and everything was
in its place – and which, ideally, was part of an identifiable tradition, referring back
to systems of a similar kind. This put them at odds with the tradition of American
writing and criticism typified by Whitman in the nineteenth century, and in the
twentieth by William Carlos Williams; since their idea of literary form was that
it should be closed rather than open, and orthodox and inherited rather than
imitative and experimental. And it permitted them to find some sort of redress, in
the balance and wholeness of art, for what they saw now as the irredeemably
unbalanced and fractured world of modernity. As Ransom himself put it, “the arts
are expiations, but they are beautiful. They seem worth the vile welter through which
homeless spirits must wade between times, with sensibilities subject to ravage as
they are.” The old active faith in traditionalism had been shattered irretrievably but,
in this way, parts of it could be reclaimed, even if only by indirection and stealth.
It could become the grounds for a new reading of literature and culture and,
consequently, help reshape consciousness; it could act as compensation, emotional
and intellectual, for the irreversible thrust of America toward the modern.
Of all the writers nurtured by the Fugitive movement, John Crowe Ransom
(1888–1974) is among the most interesting, as his poetry, gathered together
principally in Chills and Fever (1924), Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927), and then inGGray_c04.indd 434ray_c 04 .indd 434 8 8/1/2011 7:53:58 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 58 AM