Реферат: Louis D Rubin On

Shall we, he is asking, who still possess this full knowledge and who live in a world

from which we are increasingly cut off by its insularity and isolation, in which we have

mobility but no direction, energy but no outlet—shall we wait for death, or better

still, court it?

In one sense, the program put forward in I’ll Take My Stand constituted an

answer to that question. But for all the book’s effectiveness (and 23 years later it is

receiving more attention from young Southerners than ever before in its history), it would

be a mistake to believe that the Agrarian program was the only, or even the most

important, statement of the problems of modern man as Tate and his colleagues saw them.

One must always remember that Tate, Ransom, Davidson and Warren were poets primarily, not

social scientists. The place to look for Allen Tate’s ultimate statement of views is in

his poetry.

Cleanth Brooks has pointed out the relevance of Tate’s poetry to this central moral

problem. Not only is this so in regard to subject matter, however; we find it implicit in

the poetics as well. What is the most obvious characteristic of the poetry 0f Tate and his

colleagues? I think we find it stated, and recognized, from the very outset, in the first

reviews of the anthology, Fugitives, published in 1928. "Fugitive poetry makes

one distinctly feel that one of the serious and fundamental defects of nineteenth century

poetry was that it was too easy," one critic wrote. "Mr. Ransom, Mr. Tate and

Miss [Laura] Riding are not for those who read and run," another reviewer asserted.

The poet John Gould Fletcher, himself soon to join the Agrarians in the symposium,

declared in a review that the Fugitive poets had become the main impulse in America in the

leadership of "a school of intellectual poetry replacing the free verse experiments

of the elder school."

The kind of poetry that Allen Tate was writing, then, represented a disciplined,

intellectual, difficult poetry, requiring of the reader, in Tate s own words, "the

fullest co-operation of all his intellectual resources, all his knowledge of the world,

and all the persistence and alertness that he now thinks of giving to scientific

studies." It was therefore a direct challenge to the attitude that aesthetic concerns