SOURCE: Young, Thomas Daniel. “The Fugitives: Ransom, Davidson, Tate.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 319-32. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Young provides an overview of Ransom's early verse, contending that few poets of Ransom's generation “have been able to represent with greater accuracy and precision the inexhaustible ambiguities, the paradoxes and tensions, the dichotomies and ironies that make up modern life.”

In the summer of 1920 a group of young men—Vanderbilt University faculty members and students plus a few townspeople—began meeting at the home of James M. Frank on Whitland Avenue in Nashville, Tennessee, about two miles from the university, so that each member of the group could read his poems and have them criticized by the other members. These young men, including John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson (later Allen Tate and Robert...