The Fugitive

Every other Saturday night, a little circle of up-&-coming poets got together in a Nashville parlor to bandy verses. The natural leader of the group was a courtly young (33) instructor of English at Vanderbilt University, John Crowe Ransom. Allen Tate, who was one of that group in the early '20s, has said: "There was never so much talent, knowledge and character accidentally brought together in one American place in our time." Some of them: Robert Penn Warren, Laura Riding, Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore.*

For four years they published a little magazine of mostly metaphysical poetry, called The Fugitive. It soon spread their literary reputation beyond the borders of Tennessee.

Remembered Exile. All the Fugitives except Davidson have long since fled Vanderbilt and the South, but some are still favorably remembered--and particularly John Crowe Ransom. Last week Ransom, now a professor at Ohio's little Kenyon College (and editor of the Kenyon Review), celebrated his 60th birthday. In his honor, the Sewanee Review, the oldest of U.S. literary quarterlies, has devoted its entire forthcoming summer number to an estimate of Ransom as poet, critic and teacher.

Dogmatic Slumber. At 60, Ransom is a small, gentle but formidably self-possessed figure, with a silvery forelock clapped over his right temple, and deepsunk eyes. His accent is still softly Tennessean, his manner a little like a family doctor's.

Son of an itinerant Methodist preacher, John Ransom was born and raised in Tennessee, educated at Vanderbilt and Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar). After a dismal year as a prep-school Latin teacher, he taught English at Vanderbilt (with time out for World War I) for 23 years. Until the Fugitives woke him from his "dogmatic slumber," Ransom was a conventional teacher who took few pains to inspire his students. The bumptious crop of younger Fugitives stimulated him both as poet and teacher. Ransom, say his admirers in the Sewanee Review, did not try to dominate; he attained more enduring effects by the example of his intellectual decorum, the flavor of his conversation, the elegance of his craft.

His own poems were few, full of ironic understatement, salted with a special diction (blending Biblicisms, Latinity. medieval English, Southern idiom) and peppered with paradoxes. Says Harvard's F. 0. Matthiessen: "Some of the best minor poems in our language."

Ransom left Vanderbilt in 1937 for a variety of reasons, among them the low pay (after 23 years, a reported $3,600). At Kenyon he became professor of poetry, gathered another galaxy of bright lights around him,* and in 1939 founded the Kenyon Review, one of the most distinguished of U.S. little magazines.

Ransom's students have learned that he expects to be treated only as "one gentleman among others." Says Tate: "I think he was a great teacher by not being one."

* Now a Boston psychiatrist, Moore wrote 50,000 sonnets in 18 years.

* Among U.S. poets and critics who will teach at Kenyon's new School of English during the next three summers: Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, Cleanth Brooks, Lionel Trilling, William Empson, Matthiessen, R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters.

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