Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 261the poem. In his essay on Joyce’s Ulysses,“Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” Eliot
defined the mythical method as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving
a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history.”^22 Eliot saw his own experience as well as
contemporary history as a vast chaos and anarchy. He projected his personal
life onto history and sought a way to shape and order that chaos. Thus his
conservative turn. By the end of the decade he had declared himself a
classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in
religion.^23
The Modernism of the twenties took regional form in the work of
three Southern poets—John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and the young
Robert Penn Warren, all of whom were associated with the Nashville
Fugitives and helped to publish the literary magazine the Fugitivefrom 1922
to 1925. Of the sixteen poets in the Fugitive group, Ransom was the one
significant writer who reached his full (and nearly complete) poetic
development in the twenties.^24 Tate, the recognized champion of
experimental Modernism in the group, developed many of his key ideas
during the decade and published his first book, Mr. Pope and Other Poems,in
- During the decade, Warren established his basic poetic dualism, his
tragic vision of the fall of man, his interest in irony as a reigning, inclusive
poetic mode, and perhaps even his redemptive vision of language; but his
major poetic work rightly belongs to later decades in American poetry.
In formal terms, the Fugitive poets began at the same place that Eliot
and Pound had come to by the early twenties—with the sense that the free-
verse revolution needed a countercurrent. Consequently, they worked within
traditional forms. In their commitment to the historical past, their
antiindustrialism, their hatred of abstraction, their diagnosis of what Tate
called the “deep illness of the mind,” dissociation of sensibility, their belief in
what Ransom defined as the “antipathy between art and science,” and their
prevailing sense of the tragedy of modern man, the Fugitives also developed
a brand of what might be called Traditionalist Modernism which was related
to the cultural critiques leveled at modern civilization by Eliot and Pound.^25
At the same time their work grew directly out of their own native region.
One might say that the American current of European Modernism took a
strong, unexpected turn in the modern South.
The first issue of the Fugitive proclaimed that the phenomenon
sometimes “known rather euphemistically as Southern Literature has
expired” and that “The Fugitiveflees from nothing faster than the high-caste
Brahmins of the Old South.”^26 The Fugitive poets began in rebellion against
apologetic, official Southern literature, the “moonlight and magnolia” school