Sewed to keep in memory.rnFrom earth’s corners four winds blowingrnCross to make this sacred sign,rnSet in round where sun is center—rnHeaven and earth by God’s design.rnSweethearts’ fancies, roadside flowers.rnLore of plant and lift of tree.rnAll we know that’s wise and lovely.rnSewed to keep in memory.rnAll we know that’s wise and lovely,rnSewed to keep in memory.rnMiss Gallic is talking about many quilts, not just the one sherngives to Jennie. And she insists that the reproduction of a traditionalrnpattern reminds those who know how to understand orrn”read the signs” preserved in such artifacts that they are an importantrnpart of the living memory of their culture. The elegiacrntruth sewn into various coverings is like the complex but wellorchestratedrnimages that interpret the lives of men on thernshield of Homer’s Achilles. As do traditional ballads and manyrnfolktales, the quilts speak of “woman’s sorrows, woman’s gladness”rn—the harmonious relation of supposedly antitheticalrncomponents in human life. Moreover, they prepare those whorncorrectly read them to handle human limitations and the unhappyrnexpectations attendant upon our mortal state, especiallyrnas they relate history to cosmic order, the heavenly manifestationsrnof “God’s design.”rnContemplating the four winds brought together under thernimages of cross and sun, the poem concludes with a referencernto memoria in its most benign phase; for the bride, “all we knowrnthat’s wise and lovely” is now “sewed to keep in memory.” Thernquilt is a mnemonic device, rendering in the language of formrnthe prescriptive wisdom of womankind—or at least of womenrnin a traditional culture. The reconciliation of laughter and tearsrnin the artist’s sewing represents what craft may achieve. But,rnas the Nashville Agrarians insisted, the process that gives usrnquilts, laws, marriage customs, folktales, tables, and chairsrncannot be stimulated by “soft material poured in from the top.”rnOr by chronic resentment of everything providential or inherited.’rnThe idea that an elaborate and officially sanctioned memoryrnis the best means of sustaining and perpetuating a particularrnculture is everywhere apparent in the work of DonaldrnDavidson. For this poet/critic/historian, the cultivation ofrnmemory is all but an end in itself. Furthermore, Davidson isrnpersistent in insisting that artifacts of various sorts are necessaryrnto sustain and reinforce that memory in its workings, to preservernits authority and prevent its reduction from the concreternto general propositions and theories.rnBy means of such memory, history can be kept “fabulous,”rnwrites Davidson in “Woodlands, 1956-1960.” In this work, thernpoet has come to South Carolina to visit the home of WilliamrnGilmore Simms, the great novelist of the American Revolutionrnin the South, in the hope of reestablishing the communalrnmemory of what happened to and among his people in thosernstrenuous times. In Simms’ novels, he finds history with anrnedge or admonitory “bite,” which, as he informed his editors atrnFarrar and Rinehart, he intended to produce himself in therntwo-volume The Tennessee. Once he arrives at Woodlands,rnSimms’ home, he anticipates that the “folk-chain” may be restored;rnWhile by these glowing coals remembrancernKnits up its fitful present with the past.rnAnd of its future measures what will lastrnIn the crazy skein of our new circumstance.rnThis is the work of an artist who writes from a position withinrnhis culture; that is, his work if the “folk-chain” has not beenrnbroken.rnTo subsist entirely outside the scientific or rationalist explanationsrnof the human condition, to be what historian ArnoldrnToynbee called a “futurist,” is to be deprived of “deepest remembrance,”rnof “a present continuous with the past” thatrn”both draws from and feeds into the life of the imagination.”rnIndeed, it is a form of “death.” Southerners, as Davidson insistedrnas late as 1966, “still are a community bound together byrnimaginative possessions”—and by a “deep and even frighteningrnintuition of man’s radical dependence in this world.” As hernmaintained throughout his old age, the most important recollectionrnis the one recommended in the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes;rn”Remember thy Creator.” Historic empathy, rootedrnin affection, kinship, piety, and, above all, religious belief, is oftenrnat the center of a Davidson poem. It is a premodern,rnanti-Promethean, ontologically submissive attitude which assumesrnthat we cannot fully possess our inheritance by analysis.rnFor the patrimony it affirms is more of a “picture,” song, orrnstory than it is propositional truth. Living out of the resourcesrnof “transcendent memory,” the artist, the raconteur, thernfarmer, the carpenter, the composer, and even the architectrnsustain a culture by rendering its sense of itself in their handiworkrn—just as Davidson hoped with The Tennessee to make hisrnneighbors remember who they were, where they were, wherernthey belonged, what they lived by, and what they lived for, andrnhe hoped for the same with an audience of younger Southernersrnwith his brief history of the context that defined his ownrncareer. Southern Writers in the Modern World. For the Fugitivernand Agrarian movements had, as Davidson recognized, becomernpart of the literary heritage of all Southerners by the timernhe produced this account of them in his 1957 lectures at MercerrnUniversity.rnThough Davidson in his discussion of various forms of intellectualrninheritance naturally emphasizes literary tradition, hisrnopinion of even this restricted subject is grounded in an understandingrnof tradition in a larger sense as the way or habitusrnof a particular people; a set of customs, attitudes, prejudices,rntastes, narratives, and prescriptive laws. Though no one wasrnmore conscious of our intellectual heritage as a mostly Europeanrnpeople transplanted westward, Davidson also believed inrnthe singularity of American civilization—and even more fiercelyrnin the uniqueness of the South. Having a living, premodernrncultural tradition as a primary imaginative resource was, asrnDavidson demonstrates in his essays on these writers, also importantrnto Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats. That arnTennessee legacy, a prescription that is both his own and representativernof his world, is equally important to his own making,rnhis sense of belonging as rendered in his art, is the themernof Davidson’s 1940 Phi Beta Kappa poem, “Hermitage”;rnNow let my habitude be where the vinernMAY 1994/1 7rnrnrn