Modern American Literature - Terms and Definitions

by Samantha Dunivan

A group of poets and literary scholars from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN that began and contributed to The Fugitive, a literary magazine.

1914 – initiated meetings in Sidney Hirsch’s apartment with undergraduate students to discuss poetry related issues.
Meetings were postponed during WWI (members served in the war) but resumed in 1920

Among those in the group were John Crowe Ransom Walter Clyde Curry, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, Alec B. Stevenson, and others.

After winning the Nashville Poetry Prize in 1924, Laura Riding was invited to join. She was the only woman.

At meetings, they handed out copies of their poems, read them aloud, and others would respond offering thorough critical analyses.

Strong poems would generate lively discussion; weak poems were passed over or received little response.

At the suggestion of S. Hirsch, The Fugitive began and was published from April 1922 to December 1925.

The group voted by secret ballot on which poems would be included.
The title was suggested by A. Stevenson.
Although published only three years, it is considered one of the most influential publications in the history of American letters.
Donald Davidson - Fugitive philosophy: "the pursuit of poetry as an art was the conclusion of the whole matter of living, learning, and being. It subsumed everything, but it was also as natural and reasonable an act as conversation on the front porch.”

The group made Vanderbilt a source of the New Criticism (Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941)).

New Criticism – leading mode of textual analysis in the mid-twentieth century which focused attention on the individual work (novel, play, poem, etc) itself. It argued that critics had for too long paid too much attention to the biographical and historical contexts of a work of literature.
This required “close reading” of elements such as characterization, plot, setting, rhyme, and meter to identify the theme of the text.
New Critics also looked for paradox, ambiguity, irony, and tension to determine the best interpretation of the text.

They were advocates of formal techniques in poetry that were preoccupied with defending the culture and traditional values of the agrarian South against the effects of urban industrialization.
The Fugitives later evolved into a group called “The Agrarians” and published a collection of essays, I’ll Take My Stand, in 1930.

Fugitive Poets