Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Media NPT's 'The Fugitives': Still Searching for the One-Armed Man Who Can Prove Them Innocent
Posted by Jim Ridley on Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 5:00 AM
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The cornerstone of Nashville's reputation as "the Athens of the South" wasn't a scale-model replica of the Parthenon; it was an Olympian assemblage of renegade thinkers, poets and critics across the street on the Vanderbilt campus. At 9 p.m. tonight, NPT-Channel 8 broadcasts the premiere of its original documentary The Fugitives, a tribute to that gathering of giants.
Narrated by David Alford and directed by NPT's Bridget Kling, The Fugitives traces the development of the literary magazine and movement launched from Vanderbilt in the 1920s by a group including Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson and John Crowe Ransom. As poets, these bad-asses sought to elevate the South in the nation's intellectual esteem through sheer strength of work. As critics, they not only defined but labeled what came to be known as the New Criticism, the near-objective method of textual analysis that rejected any outside influence (biography, intent, how bad a day the author was having) that couldn't be gleaned from the text itself.
The doc wasn't available for preview, but NPT's website offers audio clips of the poets reading their work. It's worth a click just to hear the musical drawl of Warren's description of Florida in "Pursuit" ("Where Ponce de Leon clanked among the lilies / Where white sails skit on blue and cavort like fillies / And the shoulder gleams in the moonlit corridor....").
And for outside reading, check out Words in Air, the recently published book that gathers the long, fond, mutually inquisitive correspondence between poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Along with proof positive of the damage done to the art of letters by electronic messaging, you get charmingly gossipy, intimate sketches of Tate and fellow poets. C'mon--don't you want to know how T.S. Eliot got the nickname "Elbows"?
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Every year or so, I dig out and listen to the cassette of Warren reading his poems that you gave me years ago, Jim. It's a gift that keeps giving.
I have digitized the audio of my 1984 interview with him, just to preserve it, though the sound quality if awful. We were in a car on the interstate with one window down, and he had suffered a stroke the year before, causing some slurring of speech. With that caveat, here's a snippet where he talks about VU classmates Walter Sharp (later the donor, with wife Huldah Cheek Sharp, of Cheekwood) and Walter's brother Al. Al Sharp, a football star, was secretly writing poems while at VU:
http://tinyurl.com/RobtPennWarren
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Posted by
Tom
on 02/25/2009 at 11:25 AM
