Twelve Southerners: I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983 [1930].
In addition to rulers, ruling offices, and purposes, political regimes entail a way of life. Writing in 1930, a few years before the New Deal cinched in a strongly centralized national government committed to addressing the grievances of urban factory workers, the Twelve Southerners, many of them colleagues at Vanderbilt University, issued what for several decades seemed the last gasp of agrarianism, which had found its first political expression in Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party. Most of the Southerners were literary figures, but they criticized the New Humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More as “too abstract,” too much a philosophic critique of Bacon and Rousseau, insufficiently rooted in a “way of life”—specifically, the Southern way of life, as distinguished from and opposed to the “American or prevailing way of life.” For all his hostility to modernity, Babbitt, an Ohio boy educated at Harvard and a professor of French literature, perhaps struck them as a bit too much of a Yankee, and a suspiciously cosmopolitan one, at that. “We cannot recover our native humanism by adopting some standard of taste that is critical enough to question the contemporary arts but not critical enough to question the social and economic life which is their ground.”
Hoping for “a national agrarian movement,” they set themselves against industrialism, “the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences,” a decision founded on the illusion of human power over nature that leads to irreligion. “Mercenary and servile” industrial labor profits industrialists, who “would have the government set up an economic super-organization, which in turn would become the government.” By contrast, “the theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.” The South’s agrarian way of life found itself under threat in the South itself, as industrialism began to encroach upon the region under the tag, “The New South.”
The poet and literary critic John Crowe Ransom wrote the lead article. At the time, he was teaching at Vanderbilt University; he later moved to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio in 1937, hired by college president Gordon Keith Chalmers, himself a prominent advocate of education in the humanities. [1] In opposition to “the progressive or American idea,” the “South is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture which was according to the European principles of culture; and the European principles had better look to the South if they are to be perpetuated in this country.” By European principles he means first and foremost the “intention to live materially along the inherited line of least resistance, in order to put the surplus of energy into the free life of the mind,” not into the life of commercial-industrial go-getting, “the strange discipline which individuals turn upon themselves, enticed by the blandishments of such fine words as Progressive, Liberal, and Forward-Looking.” Despite its European origins, the Southern way of life is deliberately and intensely provincial, rather like the aristocratic, or more precisely squirearchic civil societies of pre-modern Europe. Provincialism opposes “deracination in our Western life,” the mobile way of life seen in societies gripped by commerce and industry.
Ransom points to the scientistic theories of H. G. Wells as the sort of thing he would have the South resist. Wells proposes progress without “any finality or definition.” Thanks to that lacuna, “our vast industrial machine, with its laboratory enters of experimentation, and its far-flung organs of mass production, is like a Prussianized state which is organized strictly for war”—Ransom had served as an artilleryman in the First World War—and “can never consent to peace.” Progressives would resemble the earlier American pioneers, “except that they are pioneering on principle, or from force of habit, and without any recollection of what pioneering was for.” Purposeless progress lacks any criterion that tells progressives whether they are making progress. But “nature wears out a man before man can wear out nature; only a city man, a laboratory man, a man cloistered from the normal contacts with the soil, will deny that.”
The other side of the ‘progressivist’ coin is service. That is, while men push ahead, chasing ‘progress,’ women conceive of themselves as service providers, simultaneously engaging in an Eve-like “seduction of laggard man into fresh struggles with nature,” so as to keep up with the Joneses.
Such is not the way of the true Southerner. From its beginning, “the South took life easy, which is itself a tolerably comprehensive art.” Slavery? Well, granted, but it was “more often than not, humane in practice.” When “the North and the South fought…the consequences were disastrous to both.” “No longer shackled by the weight of the conservative Southern tradition,” the North flung themselves into “industrialism, the latest form of pioneering and the worst,” producing “our present American civilization.” Impoverished by conquest, the South took on “a false pride” that wanted nothing to do with “pioneering projects of any sort,” thereby “doom[ing] her[self] to an increasing physical enfeeblement.” To pull the South out of its stupor, Ransom wants Southerners to ally with Western agrarians to effect a “counter-revolution,” with the Democratic Party as its political vehicle and Jeffersonian agrarianism as its economic engine. Had this occurred, Southerners would have headed off the New Deal. It was too late. The Great Depression hit two years later and the Roosevelt Administration took the opportunity to buy off the South with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Poet and literary critic Donald Davidson addresses the question of the position of the arts in an industrial society. ‘Little or none’ is the short answer. Since traditional arts are products of “stable, religious, and agrarian” societies, they cannot survive in unstable, irreligious, and industrial ones. Artistry takes time, but leisure in industrial society isn’t leisurely; it is frenetic, devoted to exercise and fandom, or slothful (today’s shop-girl “reads the confession magazines and goes to the movies”). Such education as there is consists of training for industrial employment. Humanists need not apply. “The product of a humanistic education in an industrial age is most likely to be an exotic, unrelated creature—a disillusionist or a dilettante.” Public libraries (often built with funds donated by industrialists) discourage the patrons “from getting their own books and keeping them at home.” Neither schools nor homes provide the humanistic foundation the arts need.
Davidson attributes this rot to the simultaneous rise of industrialism and of democracy in the middle of the eighteenth century. The rise of the middle classes “through commercial prosperity” caused democratization; “scientific discovery, backed by eighteenth-century rationalism, prepared for the other.” Political (if not social) leveling and industrialism contributed to “the materialistic reorganization of society that in effect brought a spiritual disorganization,” which the Romantic movement merely reflected, as artists turned either “against or away from society.” And so we now see “more and more poems about the difficulty of writing poetry,” like T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Others turn to satire and criticism, à la H. L. Mencken; still others decline into realism (Sinclair Lewis), which means becoming something like a historian. “Rarely if ever in America do we find a great artist slowly maturing his powers in full communion with a society of which he is an integral part.” Instead, we have “seclusionists like Emily Dickinson,” exiles like Henry James (“today France and England harbor veritable colonies of expatriates”), or poets of “vain assurance” like Walt Whitman, with his attempt “to adumbrate the glory of a democratic, muscular future that forever recedes in mists of retreating hope.” As for “New England idealism” or ‘Transcendentalism,” it “failed in the debacle of the Civil War that it egged on.”
As Ransom looked to an alliance of the South with the West in economics and politics, Davidson looked to an alliance of artists with agrarianism. “Our megalopolitan agglomerations, which make great ado about art, are actually sterile on the creative side; they patronize art, they merchandise it, but they do not produce it.” As a result, artists move to New York but then either die on the severed vine or retreat “to Europe or some treasured local retreat.” Robert Frost, James Branch Cabell, Sherwood Anderson, and Willa Cather wisely have remained “provincialists,” standing for “decentralization in the arts.” Very well, that, but the artist needs to do more. “He must be a person first of all, even though for the time being he may become less of an artist. He must enter the common arena and become a citizen,” whether as a farmer, a Congressman, or something in-between. Davidson doesn’t propose that artists ‘become political’ in the sense of taking up an ideology and promoting it; he wants artists to take up positions of responsibility in the real world.
No hearkening to the old Southern way of life could avoid some sort of consideration of slavery. The historian Frank Lawrence Owsley provided the needed apologia. The North defeated the South in war, crushed and humiliated it in peace, and waged against it a war of “intellectual and spiritual conquest” animated by “the religion of an alien God.” That religion, however, was only a cover for “the irrepressible conflict” between industrialism and agrarianism, slavery being a “red herring”—admittedly “one element” of the agrarian system but “not an essential one,” “though the Southerners under attack assumed that it was.” What is more, the slaves deserved their status, inasmuch as they were “cannibals and barbarians.” Indeed, “slavery had been practically forced upon the country by England—over the protest of colonial assemblies.” Once slaves had been admitted, Southerners considered “the expedient of freeing the slaves,” only to reject that as “too dangerous to undertake.” Continued Yankee harassment provoked “a counter-blast of fierce resentment, denying all accusations.”
Politically, plantation oligarchs didn’t rule the South; rural folk descended from the yeomanry of rural England did. Southerners took their political models from ancient Rome, their favorite being Cincinnatus. Although “Lincoln and Seward and the radical Republicans clothed the conflict later in robes of morality,” this was only “a shibboleth to win the uninformed and unthinking to the support of a sinister undertaking,” the dominance of Northern industrial interests over the virtuous Southern yeomanry, with control of the federal government as the instrument of this crime. In contrast, “the agrarian South asked practically nothing of the federal government in domestic legislation”—the Fugitive Slave Law notwithstanding.
As for that “alien God,” Southerners initially “inclin[ed] to Jeffersonian liberalism of the deistic type.” Once challenged by New England descendants of Puritanism on the slavery issue, Southern ministers “searched the Scriptures by day and night and found written, in language which could not be misunderstood, a biblical sanction of slavery.” A “religious revival” ensued. Northern abolitionists, unwilling “to accept scriptural justification of slavery,” now began to “repudiate the Scriptures,” losing “confidence in orthodoxy and tend[ing] to become deistic as the South had been.” If the real cause of the conflict was economic, the passions of fear and resentment sparked something resembling a religious war in spirit.
The Imagist poet and Confederate soldier’s son John Gould Fletcher wrote on education. Up until 1865, public education in the United States aimed at “produc[ing] good men,” men ready to assume the duties of self-governing citizenship, but “today we are out to withdraw the command of men over themselves,” to fit them for obedience. “The Scotch-Irish were in fact the first to establish classical schools in the South, and their influence on subsequent education was very great.” Before the American Revolution, “compared to the uniformity of caste and observance which prevailed in New England,” the Southern schools “were on the whole much more tolerant, more free and easy, more humanistic, and more open to all classes of the population.” Southerners established many academies which provided “the essentials of a good secondary education” at a low price—a classical/humanistic education, neither sectarian and doctrinal nor scientific and technical. The price of Northern victory in the Civil War was the loss of the classical education, which taught that “the inferior, whether in life or in education, should exist only for the sake of the superior,” replacing that with an education putting the superior “at the disposal of the inferior”—liberal education twisted to vocational purposes and thereby becoming merely practical or technical.
Lyle H. Lanier, a professor of philosophy and psychology (and sometime advocate of ‘race science’), offers a serviceable critique of progressivism, evidently based on the writings of Eric Voegelin. “Modern industrialism has found the use of ‘progress,’ as a super-slogan, very efficient as a public anesthetic.” The notion originated in the Renaissance, with its concept of immanence, as distinguished from transcendence (shared by Biblical revelation and Platonic philosophy). Immanence reached its philosophic culmination in the system conceived by Hegel, “the first thinker to generate a complete philosophy of history.” Combined with the positivism which “may be considered a refinement of Bacon’s philosophy” of experimentalism, Hegelian historicism led to evolutionism. In social thought, evolutionism’s greatest contemporary exponent is John Dewey.
According to Dewey, democratic socialism can be realized “even though we should have to remake human nature to secure it”—a “process of very dubious prospect,” Lanier suspects. And even if it were possible, any collectivism founded upon industrialism will prove impersonal, not “face-to-face.” Genuine association exists “only in the agrarian community and in the villages and towns which are its adjuncts.” Such associations in turn rest on families, not communes. The “corporate industrial regime,” with its “economic and psychological communism,” arises more or less inevitably from the modern West’s direction of “the greater part of a nation’s energies” toward “an endless process of increasing the production and consumption of goods.” Dewey’s socialist adjustment to industrialism—under it, the workers will own the machines—will not do. “I have spent many months in a large tire factory operating a machine for which I could never form any emotional attachment.”
Further, and more fundamentally, “it is not the machine, however, but the theory of the use of the machine to which I object.” The theory of industrialism, which assumes that the relief of man’s estate—an effort moreover presented as the inevitable outcome of ‘History,’ in which progress is deemed to be immanent—dehumanizes workers by making them into instruments of production, along with the machines they tend. But on the contrary, “the only intelligible meaning of progress implies social institutions for producing psychological effects just the reverse of those so outstanding in our Machine Age.” We should “renounce the capitalistic industrial program,” along with the socialist industrialism that rises in opposition to it. We should also renounce “the false glamour of cities,” under whose machine-generated light capitalists and socialists alike bask; the impersonal way of life in cities can never satisfy human souls, which require personal the relationships of love and hate, friendship and enmity, to be themselves.
The literary critic Allen Tate offers “Some Remarks on the Southern Religion.” He shares Lanier’s rejection of historicism: “The Long View [of history] is…the cosmopolitan destroyer of Tradition,” offering “no reason to prefer Christ to Adonis.” Historicism is the most recent instance of Western rationalism, but religion, the animating spirit of any tradition, isn’t a matter of reasoning, “is not properly a discussion of anything; so any discussion of religion is a piece of violence, a betrayal of the religious essence undertaken for its own good, or for the good of those who live by it.” Tate objects to the Western (Catholic and Protestant) introduction of reason into religion in the form of theology. “The Eastern Church never had to do this, nor did it ever have to construct a plausible rationality round the supernatural to make it acceptable; it has never had a philosophy, nor a Dogma in our sense; it never needed one.” [2]
This being so, “where can an American take hold of Tradition?” At first glance, the South offers an unpromising prospect. The old South “was a feudal society without a feudal religion,” inasmuch as Jamestown was “a capitalistic enterprise,” not a religious venture, like Puritan Plymouth, Massachusetts. As part of the migration of Europeans to the new content, Southerners partook of European notions and conditions. These, “since the sixteenth century, have made it impossible for any community of European origin to remain spiritually isolated and to develop its genius, unless that genius is in harmony with the religious and economic drift of the civilization at large,” the drift denoted by the word ‘modernity.’ Thus, having begun in capitalism, the “political atmosphere,” the way of life and the ethos of the South, “did not realize its genius in time, but continued to defend itself on the political terms of the North”—the terms of industrialism and democracy, not agrarianism and feudalism. The South contradicted itself, allowing “its powerful rival gain the ascendancy.” Crucial to this failure was its attempt “to encompass its destiny within the terms of Protestantism, in origin, a non-agrarian and trading religion, hardly a religion at all, but a result of secular ambition.” In sum, “they defended their society as a whole with the catchwords of eighteenth-century politics,” which is “why the South separated from the North too late, and lost its cause.”
In the years since the Civil War, without “a fitting religion,” the “social structure of the South began grievously to break down.” The aftermath of military defeat has exposed “the lack of a religion which would make her special secular system”—her feudalism, now seen in the system of segregation—an “inevitable and permanently valuable one.”
The beginnings of such a religion may be seen in the sensibility of the not conspicuously religious Mr. Jefferson. “The heresy of New England is beautifully recorded in the correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson where the two sages discuss the possibility of morals. Jefferson calls his judgment ‘taste’—reliance on custom, breeding, ingrained moral decision. But Adams needs a ‘process of moral reasoning,’ which forces the individual to think out from abstract principle his role at a critical moment of action.” This shows “how deeply” New England “had broken with the past,” “how far” she “had gone from Europe.” What it really shows is how far Tate has gone from Jefferson’s greatest moral and political syllogism, the Declaration of Independence, a specimen of moral reasoning from “abstract principle” if ever there was one.
Tate may not much like the idea of natural right, however. “Aware of the treachery of nature,” Southerners “tended to like stories, very simple stories with a moral,” as “all agrarians” do. Unfortunately, this habit left them defenseless against those heretical Northern rationalists. “The South would not have been defeated had it possessed a sufficient faith in its own kind of God,” he bravely asserts. Who or what the Southern God would be, he does not say—one consistent with agrarianism and feudalism, to be sure, somehow European but not ‘Western.’ Some years later, Tate would find in Roman Catholicism such a God, a spiritual move unmade by most Southerners.
Back on less mystifying ground, the historian and political scientist Herman Clarence Nixon, proud son of Possum Trot, Alabama, concedes that “there is no point in a war with destiny or the census returns,” while nonetheless deploring “the inner and articulate spirit of industrialism” now invading the South like a second coming of General Sherman. He hopes to maintain a balance there between agriculture and manufacturing, and would indeed join with the New Dealers a few years later, helping to keep the South politically solid for the Democratic Party for a couple more generations. (He would later call this “the constructive acceptance of the inevitable.”) Here, he maintains that the Civil War “was not necessary for the fairly early termination of slavery” because “the so-called old South, with its recruited aristocracy, was working toward a balanced industry, a reformed agriculture, and a free school system for the yeoman, when the war upset the orderly process of evolution.” This claim is as irrefutable as it is unprovable but, be it as it may, today the South’s “historic agrarianism offers a check and a contrast to America’s rush from a continental frontierism to a world-penetrating industrialism under a maximum play of materialistic motive and a minimum restraint of traditional background.”
Sometime farmer, essayist, novelist, and biographer of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Andrew Lytle concurs with Nixon’s assessment of post-Civil War America. “Since 1865 an agrarian Union has been changed into an industrial empire bent on conquest of the world’s good and ports to sell them in,” a policy that yields warfare and has proven ruinous to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Industrialism “must” become, first, socialist, then communist, then ‘soviet’ or oligarchic. “This one-time Republic” would have done far better had it listened to the wisdom of John C. Calhoun, “a philosopher as well as a logician [who] could see beyond his times.” Unfortunately, Andrew Jackson’s “fight with Calhoun” over the character of the Union “so confused the agrarian states” of the South and the West “that they were unable to stand united before the irrepressible conflict” with the industrial North.
This notwithstanding, the South will rise again because the North is doomed. “Industrialism is multiplication. Agrarianism is addition and subtraction. The one by attempting to reach infinity must become self-destructive; the other by fixing arbitrarily its limits upon nature will stand.” That is, the mass production of goods, built on the principle of two-times-two-times-two, with no limit, amounts to a logic of imperial conquest, which must ultimately fail because nature, entirely conquered, must end in the destruction of human nature. The arithmetic principle of two-plus-two, or of two-minus-two, brings a finite result, naturally sustainable.
In the meantime, and in tandem with Ransom, Lytle proposes a policy for a united front for conservatives, consisting of the agrarian South and West along with agrarian communities that survive in the North. The policy consists first and foremost of rejecting “the articles the industrialists offer for sale.” “Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall.’ In your churches, “turn away from the liberal capons who fill the pulpits as preachers” and seek instead “a priesthood than may manifest the will and intelligence to renounce science and search out the Word in the authorities.” If you sustain yourself, growing your own food, shearing your own lambs, drawing water from your own well, you “can live in an industrial world without a great deal of cash,” escaping a substantial part of the taxation that feeds the federal government.
Slavery being gone, what about the race question now? The distinguished novelist and literary Robert Penn Warren endorses Booker T. Washington’s preference for segregation: “Let the negro sit beneath his own vine and fig tree.” He too, after all, is a fellow agrarian, a man of village and cabin, one moreover “as little equipped to establish himself” after his emancipation “as he would have been to live again, with spear and breech-clout, in the Sudan or Bantu country.” “He did not know how to make a living, or, if he did, he did not know how to take thought for the morrow.” Reconstruction did little to improve him, and the political dimension of the education he received only served to corrupt him. He was “used as an instrument of oppression” by the Northern carpetbaggers, thereby “sadly mortgag[ing] his best immediate capital,” namely, “the confidence of the Southern white man with whom he had to live.” “The rehabilitation of the white man’s confidence for the negro is part of the Southern white man’s story since 1880.” In the meantime, Washington’s program of racial separatism appears preferable to premature integration, although Warren does contend that “it will be a happy day for the South when no court discriminates in its dealings between the negro and the white man.” Some years later, after the Second World War, Warren concluded that negroes who sat under their own vines and fig trees unfortunately had plenty to make them afraid under the unkind auspices of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation. He reversed his position, becoming a prominent spokesman for civil rights.
Two stories follow—one a fiction, the other a barely disguised autobiographical sketch. Each aims at personalizing the agrarian doctrines advanced by the other contributors. The literary biographer John Donald Wade offers “The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius,” a character possibly modeled after Wade’s uncle, who spent his young manhood during Reconstruction. Lucius’s classical education, gentlemanliness, Christianity, and liberalism in the original sense of generosity, to say nothing of his life as a farmer, makes him the very model of a Southern Agrarian. Henry Blue Kline’s “William Remington,” born two generations later at the beginning of the twentieth century, confronts not so much Yankee intrusiveness but his own alienation. Whereas Lucius is firm and calm in his Southernness, young Mr. Remington finds that his “education could not have made him more unfit to live life on the terms he found prevailing about him if it had been carefully crafted with this end in view.” In college, “finding that he loved literature and the arts and philosophy, he passed over the courses of study which would have taught him how to earn a comfortable and morally painless living, only to turn instead to the useless ‘humanities.'” This proved early evidence of “a deeply rooted determination to live his life, in so far as he possessed free agency to control it, on terms dictated by his own critical intelligence and by nothing else.”
“In a word, he was due for a hard bump.”
What to do after graduation. He felt “curiously unfit” for a career as “a teacher-philosopher,” in imitation of “one of his gods,” Aristotle. What about being a philosopher, simply? Ah, but “William was not quite so naïve as not to know that modern Socrateses are given the hemlock cup not at the end but at the beginning of their career.” And although Jesus was “the most ethical man the world had ever known,” William knew that “nowhere in the world” that he had seen “would any man be suffered to practice Jesus’s ethics,” and, consistent with his estimation of Socrates, he had no taste for martyrdom. As for Shakespeare, well, William understood he was no Shakespeare.
He could only fall back on himself, in “his chosen place among his chosen people.” There he would find fellow resisters. “With a central paternalistic government tending to reduce every metropolis and hamlet of the nation to a cultural common denominator, with cheap and rapid transportation and highly organized communications tending to extend the metropolitan areas and their indigenous ideals over most of the forty-eight states, with imperialistic industrial exploiters abroad in the land, any ideal of provincialism can be kept in force only by fighting for it.” As for Kline, he spent most of his career as a government worker, briefly as a journalist in St. Louis.
The playwright and theater critic Stark Young contributed the final essay, a defense of aristocracy. A century earlier, Tocqueville had seen this inclination in the Southern planters. He hoped that his fellow European aristocrats would learn to guide democracy, supplement its inexorable energies with touches of moderation and the prudence that comes from long experience in politics. He had less hope for the Southerners. Young might reply that it is too late for aristocratic guidance, in Europe or America. Aristocracy nonetheless has its charms, the South its possibilities. First of all, however, one must scour all traces of democracy from the Southerner’s mind. “There will never again be distinction in the South until—somewhat contrary to the doctrine of popular and profitable democracy—it is generally clear that no man worth anything is possessed by the people, or sees the world under a smear of the people’s wills and beliefs.” To this end, “education of the university sort, not professional or technical, is suited to a small number,” individuals not weakened by “the poison of the success idea.” Moral indignation also should be avoided. Rather in the spirit of Jamestown, “I had…the pleasure once of saying to the dean of a famous old New England college, upon his complaining of the lapses of the students on some matter about which he preached continually, that he should try giving some reason besides the moral wrong of it.”
In the South, “the aristocratic implied…a certain long responsibility for others; a habit of domination; a certain arbitrariness; certain ideas of personal honor, with varying degrees of ethics, amour propre, and the fantastic.” Rule by such persons ranks above “a society of bankers and bankers’ clerks, department-store communities, manufacturers and their henchmen and their semi-slaves, and miserable little middle-class cities, frightened of one’s position in the country club, snatching at the daily paper to see if one is all right.” The man formed by the commercial-industrial way of life “does not care to know anything, but merely to know about it. He is less concerned with the truth than with what people will think.” That thought might readily be summarized in that “sickening epithet,” ‘progressive.’
Change, yes, because “so long as we are alive, we are not the same.” “Yet [we] remain ourselves.” Recalling what he’s learned from Aristotle, although the South, being alive, is changing and must change, “for no thing can there be any completeness that is outside its own nature,” and were this not so, “all nature by now would have dissolved in chaos and folly, nothing in it, neither its own self nor any other.” Thanks to some mercy in the air, Young didn’t live to see ‘multiculturalism.’
Often left for dead, the corpus of Twelve-Southerner thought survives, its complacency on racial matters surgically removed, in such thinkers as Rod Dreher and others, who often derive their primary inspiration not from the Southerners but from Russell Kirk. Latter-day agrarians no longer dream of a grand political coalition, and most assuredly not of any alliance with the Democratic Party, long severed from the ‘Solid South.’ It has adopted what might be described as an enclave strategy, one awaiting the collapse of modernity and its science.
Notes
- Ransom died in 1974. I attended his last public poetry reading, a couple of years earlier; the influence of his approach to literary interpretation, called “the New Criticism” when he launched it in the early 1940s, focusing on careful reading of literary texts as texts, with minimal attention to historical context, remained influential there. The New Criticism served as a counterweight to historicist, often inclining toward Marxist or neo-Marxist, methods of interpretation, which (then as now) tended to reduce literary works to expressions of their ‘time’—specifically, the social and economic conditions of the period in which they were written.
- Where Tate gets this, I cannot say. Orthodox Christianity has a long line of distinguished theologians. Speaking very generally, one might say that Eastern theologians tap into neo-Platonic philosophy, while Western theologians in the Catholic tradition have preferred Aristotle.
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