Fugitive Poets Bring South to Harvard

About 30 years ago several serious undergraduates at Vanderbilt College in Tennessee got together, and started to write poetry and read it to each other under the tutelage of a young faculty member named John Crown Ransom. Last week these undergraduates, who called themselves "Fugitives," met to honor Ransom in his 70th year, and gave a series of readings that gave the audience some idea of the South and its poetry.

Ransom himself gave a reading in Sanders Theatre Thursday night which included tragic poems, nonsense poems, and a Harvard poem. He was introduced by William Y. Elliott, director of the Summer School and himself a Fugitive, who noted that Ransom "made all literature live, because it was something that he himself lived."

He read some of his "tragic" poems--"Dead Boy," "Janet Walking,"--and one of his metaphysical poems, "Persistent Explorer," of a man "who knows he is not going to find anything."

Out of "the metaphysical commitment," he continued, "a poet goes into fantasies." He read the humorous "Captain Carpenter," and some nonsense poems: "Our Two Worthies," "Her Eyes,"--a "vindictive" poem about a woman who "came to our house too much" and "was taller than I,"--and the "Survey of Literature."

He concluded with "Prelude to an Evening" and "Painted Head," and at the audience's request, he read a poem he had first written for a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa convocation in 1939.

Ransom then retired until the next afternoon, when he was joined by five other Fugitives and a second-generation Fugitive in Burr B.

Allen Tate opened the gathering with an announcement to the audience that "the fiction for this occasion is that you are not present. This is a conversation among ourselves."

Speaking first was novelist Andrew Lytle, who discussed the environment which the South has inherited. Lytle's talk was followed by Elliott's reading of three of his unpublished poems, including "Armageddon."

A sombre note was introduced with the playing of a recording of the late Merrill Moore reading a number of his poems about death, Seamus O'Neill, an Irish poet, read three of his poems that had been translated from the Gaelic, noting, "it puzzles me that people who have no knowledge of Irish history are still interested in it." Mr. Chaney then called the Fugitive movement "the greatest philosophical meetings" of his life.

Robert Lowell, the second-generation Fugitive, added some humor to the meeting with his "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid," read after a brief exchange with Tate. "When 'Cal' first appeared in Tennessee," Tate reminisced of Lowell, "he thought a mule was a donkey." Lowell pointed his finger at him and charged, "When I first appeared in Tennessee, you thought Emerson was a mule." When the applause and laughter at this remark had died down, Tate looked up quietly and said, "I still do."

Elliott assumed the chairmanship, while Tate read his own stirring "Ode to the Confederate Dead."

After another warm introduction, Ransom read his "Autumn Harvests," called by Tate "the finest poem ever to come out of the South.