Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Culture

National Review, April 21, 1997 by Jeffrey Hart

THE appearance now of solid biographies of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks testifies to the continuing importance of both men and calls again to mind the importance of what they thought and did. Though both grew up in the South, they were, in their temperaments, different kinds of Southerners. As Joseph Blotner demonstrates in his Robert Penn Warren (Random House, 585 pp., $35), Warren was the more expansive and tumultuous, extending himself into all areas of literature: short story, novel, poetry, criticism, biography, drama. His subjects, centrally, were history, power, and the depths of the heart.

Yet he also came together often with the more restrained and "classical" Cleanth Brooks. Vanderbilt undergraduates, Rhodes Scholars, men of letters, founders of the important Southern Review, they were often together in an attempt to define "the South": what it meant to poetry, but also to history, and what it might mean in the continuing present.

The importance of these new biographies may, indeed, lie in their providing an occasion to address a question that goes far beyond literature. That is the question of what the South and its history should mean to present-day Americans. To put it succinctly, is the South's past "usable"?

Both biographies are full of information and colorful anecdotes. In his valuable Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Culture (Virginia, 608 pp., $34.95), Mark Royden Winchell writes that Brooks "combined a kind heart and a tough mind more successfully than anyone I have ever met." This could also be said of Warren, with his personal grace and incisive intelligence. I would add that Brooks had the most impressive ability to listen that I've ever encountered. I'm sure that Warren shared this with him, since their common approach to literary criticism -- the approach known as New Criticism -- was at once simple and demanding. Its "method" was to subordinate the critic's personal ego to the poem or story he was commenting on, listen to it very carefully, and always respect the integrity of the object.

The new biographies tell us just as much, however, about the circles of colleagues among whom Brooks and Warren carved out their individual places. In assessing the Southern past, we will do well to recall the contributions -- literary, cultural, and political --of those Southern intellectuals referred to as the Fugitives and Agrarians.

What concerned the Fugitives and the Agrarians? The former movement was almost entirely literary, while the latter was largely cultural and political. There was imaginative power in both groups, especially the Fugitives.

Mostly Vanderbilt undergraduates and young English instructors, the Fugitives began meeting informally in 1915 as a sort of philosophical discussion group, and from the beginning the dominant figure was John Crowe Ransom, an English instructor. By the time Ransom and Donald Davidson came back from the war, the focus of the group had changed decisively to literature, especially with the publication in 1919 of Ransom's Poems about God. Younger men (Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren) joined the group as they arrived at Vanderbilt, and between 1922 and 1925 they published an important magazine of poetry called The Fugitive.

None of them was at the level of Eliot, Yeats, Frost, Pound, or Stevens (competition was stiff in those days), but many of their poems will last as long as poetry itself lasts. For example, here is Tate's Aeneas gazing forlornly at the Roman dome of the Capitol in Washington:

I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall

By the Potomac, the great dome lit the water,

The city my blood had built I knew no more

While the screech-owl whistled his new delight

Consecutively dark.

That is memorable. Much influenced by Vergil, Tate liked to use adjectival constructions to achieve a slowed and lapidary quality. Ransom, a bit more to my taste, is less Latinate, and as a poet certainly in the same class. Warren and Davidson are somewhere nearby too. (The Fugitive Poets, edited by William Pratt, is the best one-volume selection of the group.)

The dates of the Fugitive group are important: 1915 - 1928. They coincide with the peak of High Modernism in all the arts. Between 1922 and 1925, and leaving out much, the following appeared: Ulysses, The Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, Frost's New Hampshire, Yeats's The Tower, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Harmonium, The Magic Mountain, The Sound and the Fury, The Counterfeiters. In Nashville, very far from New York, London, and Paris, the young men discussed these great developments and studied them.

The High Modernist Renaissance was almost as impressive in literature as the original Renaissance was. What occasioned it? For one thing, I would guess, the experience of a collapsing bourgeois order drove these writers toward a culture of Art as a substitute order; the original Renaissance had stood in something of the same relationship to the Medieval order.

The Nashville group were rebels against, Fugitives from, the genteel Southern tradition of moonlight, magnolias, and Walter Scott. They wrote difficult, learned poems, often laced with irony and expressive of alienation. Tate's famous "Ode to the Confederate Dead" is a Southern Waste Land. Such poetry, and High Modernist poetry generally, because it was difficult required careful reading. Hence the New Criticism was developed, a spin-off from Modernism.