Word: tates
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fugitive meetings were rather informal," Tate remembers. "They didn't start out as meetings for reading our poems: they were just philosophical discussions, aesthetics, that sort of thing. Gradually, people began to bring poems to read, and when a large group of poems had accumulated, we decided to publish a little magazine...
...Nashville papers ridiculed the first issue when it was published, and the Chancellor of the University refused to subscribe to it. I think Radcliffe Squires (Tate's biographer) makes a rather amusing remark about that. He says, 'Looking at the first issue, one wonders why anybody expected anything of these people...
Nevertheless, the nucleus of the group's members (John Ransom, Donald Davidson, "Red" Warren, and Tate) not only improved on their initial, poetic promise, but by 1930 had sketched a credo for the South, with the anthology I'll Take My Stand, urging agrarianism over industrialism and warning the South against becoming a replica of the North. "The culture of the soil," wrote Ransom, "is the best and most sensitive of vocations...
...amusing to remember that I'll Take My Stand was attacked more violently in the South than it was in the North," Tate recalls. "The Southerners asked questions like, 'Can these people really milk cows?' That was how they saw agrarianism...
...Although Tate is sceptical about the poet-activist ("Our friend Shelley thought if he put those tracts he wrote in toy boats in Hyde Park, and people read them, a great revolution would take place!"), he does include social criticism as part of his responsibility as man and poet. For him, I'll Take My Stand was as much a defense of poetry as a defense of the South...