Word: tates
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...vitality belies a long career whose roots are with Edgar Allen Poe and Rudyard Kipling, whose growth shows the influence of John Crowe Ransom and T.S. Eliot and whose maturity, in turn, affected Theodore Roethke and John Berryman. It is somehow easier to believe Tate has had three children in the past four years than to realize Robert E. Lee and James Meredith could figure in his imagination simultaneously...
Loyalty to the South he'd inherited and devotion to the South he invisioned were crucial to Tate's intellectual development. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt after the first World War, he became part of a group of literati called the Fugitives, including John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, deeply dedicated to Southern regionalism, but "fleeing from nothing faster than the high caste Brahmins of the Old South...
...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...