Modern American Poetry

(^262) Edward Hirsch
of post–Civil War Southern poetry. Initially, they showed little interest in
regional self-consciousness and self-definition. Their most common and
persistent theme was the alienation of the artist from society, especially
Southern society. But the South suffered a powerful economic and social
shock after the end of the war as an essentially closed and static society
increasingly opened up to industrialism and mass culture. As the twenties
progressed, modern industrialism encroached further and further into
traditional Southern culture. After the national attention and criticism
directed at the South during the Scopes trial, the Fugitives began to rethink
their ideas of the old South and how it might resist the spirit of technology
and science as well as the onslaught of American materialism. They were
already classicists in literature, traditionalists in religion—they also became
regionalists. By the end of the decade they had turned into Agrarians, a
movement which culminated in the manifesto I’ll Take My Stand(1930). In
that book, twelve Southern writers defended an agrarian economy and
looked back nostalgically to a preindustrial, racially segregated, Christian
South. In so doing they turned away from the progressivism of contemporary
America and toward the conservatism of older European traditions.
John Crowe Ransom’s first book, Poems about God(1919), consisted of
poems which Randall Jarrell once described as “old-fashioned amateurishly
direct jobs that remind you of the Longfellow-Whittier-Lowell section of
your sixth-grade reader.”^27 Ransom himself came to consider them
apprentice work, and none survived into his later Selected Poems.They do
indicate, however, the beginning of Ransom’s furious war against
abstractionism, his desire to knit up what he perceived to be the modern
dissociation of reason from sensibility. Ransom’s development as a poet was
so rapid that in a few years he had discovered and mastered his mature
style—with its formal elegance and technical skillfulness, its complex mix of
dictions and tones, its wry wit and understatement, its cool surface and subtle
use of irony—and written about a dozen or so nearly flawless lyrics. His two
books Chills and Fever(1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds(1927) contain
nearly all of the poems he wished to preserve. They represent his primary
achievement in poetry. By the end of the decade Ransom had mainly stopped
writing poetry and turned his attention to philosophical literary and social
criticism.
The principal theme that runs through all of Ransom’s work is our
curious and tragic human doubleness, our divided natures and sensibilities.
He once told Robert Penn Warren that he thought of man as an “oscillating
mechanism,” and for him Eliot’s notion of the fragmented modern psyche
was a psychological rather than a historical truth.^28 Ransom’s poems chart a