At left, John Crowe Ransom.In 1960 Louise Cowan published a book about the Fugitive poets, published (not surprisingly - it's long been a haven for Tate, Ransom, Penn Warren, Donald Davidson scholars and poetic followers) by LSU Press. The American Scholar ran a review of this book. Robert Langbaum wrote it, which shocked me slightly since I think of Langbaum as a liberal northern (Jewish) critic more interested in what might be called "northern" problems of poetry. He was at the time still working on nature poetry (in the New England sense) and Hardy, of course. Anyway, I'm fascinated by what Langbaum says about the Fugitives' relationship to modernism: "The Fugitives did not start with a modernist or regionalist program. Modernism was an issue among them; and the controversy between the radical modernist, Tate, and Ransom who was, as Tate said, 'modern without knowing it,' is one of the most interesting things in the book." The story is all about the realization among southern intellectuals that there was a political implication to their poetic practice and critical theory. Prior to that reckoning, they could be "modern" or not modern "without knowing it." After that, the extent of the convergence, in them, of modernism and Southern conservativsm (including, for some, apologetics about slavery and the Southern defeatist complex) became something they had to work out, usually with the effect of pulling the modernism out of them. Certainly this is one way of telling the story of John Crowe Ransom.
Langbaum's review: American Scholar, vol 29, 3 (1960), p. 430-31.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
