contributed his Agrarian essay to 17/ Take My Stand. In otherrnwords, he was a Fugitive first and an Agrarian second, thoughrnthe poem is singular for Lytle, who, unlike the other main Fugitives,rnwrote mostly fiction and made his reputation as a novelistrnrather than as a poet. On the strength of that one poemrnalone, Andrew Lytle deserves to be called both a Fugitive andrnan Agrarian and as such one of the major cultivators of Americanrnletters in this century.rnAnd what were these ideas? First, the Fugitives assumedrnthat poetry itself is a kind of knowledge essential to humanrnbeings, that we need great literature—”poetry” is a genericrnname for the best writing—as we need such basic things asrnfood and water, or political and social institutions, or religiousrnbeliefs, or military weapons, or scientific theories and methodsrnfor controlling nature. In other words, the Fugitives put commonrnlanguage to its highest use as art, holding that we need thernpoet’s work in order to know ourselves, because, in the wordsrnof Allen Tate’s essay on “The Man of Letters in the ModernrnWorld,” it is the poet who above all “must recreate for his agernthe image of man.”rnThen the Agrarian idea was superimposed on the Fugitivernidea, giving further potency to the relation between literaturernand society. The Agrarian idea can be reduced to thernthought—nowhere better expressed than by Andrew Lytlernhimself in one of his own later essays, “The State of Letters inrna Time of Disorder”—that “the great, at least lasting, literaturesrnand representative arts are found in either a pastoral or anrnagrarian society.” Now, many have disagreed with this idea,rnand a storm of controversy has surrounded Agrarianism from itsrnbeginning: modern society, unsympathetic critics declare, isrngoverned by capitalism, and the pastoral society of the Agrariansrnhas been left far behind, a part of the past that is never tornbe recovered. Many critics still ridicule Agrarianism, but thernideals on which literary art is based do not derive from capitalism,rna pragmatic economic theory dedicated to the makingrnof money; rather, the literary arts are still based on the cultivationrnof nature, an Agrarian ideal, which extends to the cultivationrnof letters by analogy and which capitalism has notrnreplaced. So if we follow the logic of Andrew Lytle and thernFugitive-Agrarians, poetry is as necessary to humane existence,rnthat is to civilized life, as farming and husbandry, that is therncultivation of nature, from which city dwellers still derive theirrnsustenance in food and their enjoyment of natural abundancernand beauty. Ransom spoke of Agrarianism as the “aesthetics ofrnregionalism,” which meant to him that, wherever one lived, naturernwas to be appreciated for its beauty as well as its nourishment.rnDespite its critics, Agrarianism is not an outworn or discreditedrnphilosophy, for though it is true that most Americansrntoday live in cities, not on farms, whatever aesthetic sense wernretain as individuals or as a nation continues to come from thernland rather than from the factory. Americans have a great literaturernnot because we are a progressive, powerful, technologicalrnsociety but because we have a long memory, which reachesrndeep into the past to help us understand ourselves andrncriticize the present generation.rnDonald Davidson captured the Fugitive-Agrarian philosophyrnbeautifully in a late poem called “Lines Written for Allen TaternOn His Sixtieth Anniversary,” which was composed in 1959,rnlong after the Fugitives and Agrarians had gathered at Vanderbilt.rnReaching into the past to recall meetings held in thern1920’s and I930’s at Benfolly, the home of Allen Tate and CarolinernGordon in Clarksville, Tennessee, the poem opens withrnan image of the Civil War in action, the sound of guns firing atrna fort near Clarksville on the Cumberland River, followed byrnAndrew Lytle’s voice as he led his fellow writers in a discussionrnof Southern history and myth:rnThe sound of guns from beleaguered DonelsonrnUp-river flowed again to Benfolly’s hearth.rnYear to familiar year we had heard it runrnWorld-round and back, till Lytle cried out: “EarthrnIs good, but better is land, and bestrnA land still fought-for, even in retreat;rnFor how else can Aeneas find his restrnAnd the child hearken and dream at his grandsire’srnfeet?”rnDavidson’s poem is proof that Andrew Lytle played a centralrnrole among the Fugitive-Agrarians, because his historical memoryrnand mythical imagination enabled him to find a parallel betweenrnthe Southerners defeated by the Yankees in the CivilrnWar and the Trojans defeated by the Greeks in the TrojanrnWar. He argues dramatically for an invincible spirit in thernSouth, which could, like that of the Trojan hero Aeneas, go onrnafter defeat to found a new civilization to replace the old. Lytle,rnas Davidson pictures him, is a unifier of past and present,rnbasing his regional loyalty on a timeless sense of human destiny,rnmingling his voice with those of Ransom and Tate and Warrenrnand Davidson to honor the muses of poetry and “To join thernlong procession where it winds / Up to a mountain home”—arnfinal destination that sounds much more like Monteagle thanrnClarksville. If Davidson’s poem opens at Benfolly, it appears tornend at Monteagle.rny^ ndrew Lytle’srn/-/ whole view ofrnt _ ^ C ^ life stems fromrnthe family, first and last, which hernbelieves to be the bastion of Southernrnsociety even now.rnAndrew Lytle is no anachronism as one of the leadingrnFugitive-Agrarians. He is a leading modernist as well, for modernismrnhas always been a self-critical movement; in StephenrnSpender’s happy phrase, it is “revolutionary traditionalism.”rnThat is to say, modernists have been revolutionary in form butrntraditional in content, deploring much of what is superficiallyrnmodern—in particular the dominance of money andrnmachines—and favoring instead new expressions of the olderrnvalues among which religion and art are dominant. Althoughrnthese writers have been realistic enough to recognize that,rnagain to quote Lytle, while “we still live within the confines ofrnChristendom . . . . we are in its satanic phase.”rnThus, if we place Andrew Lytle where he belongs, as a modernrnwriter who voices old truths in compelling and oftenrndisturbing new forms, we are identifying him broadly as a cul-rnMAY 1994/29rnrnrn