I’ve Kissed A Lip Or Two

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

John Crowe Ransom

Walter Clyde Curry is a member of The Fugitives along with more celebrated founders Donald Davidson, John Ransom, Alan Tate and Robert Penn Warren, among others.  Curry was primarily a literary critic over the course of his career and left his mark teaching.  A forty year faculty member of Vanderbilt University from 1915 to 1955, Curry produced exactly the kind of books I dislike, extensive academic analysis of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer.  A self styled medievalist and agrarian, he felt the culture of the medieval past and the south should shape the future of literature.   The Fugitives believed they had developed a new way of evaluating literature that provided a bridge from past to present.  And in the end they were somewhat right.  The future evolved either in part because of their influence or more likely because their ideas were fundamentally rejected by a more diverse artistic and academic community. 

Some academic work stands up over time, The Fugitives and in particular Curry’s legacy is a bit more convoluted in my opinion.  It’s hard to celebrate a group of coddled affluent white academics that romanticized the deep south’s history of bigotry, slavery and white supremacy when that level of white blindness falls flat on it’s face today,   Curry, one of the least talented poets in the group in my opinion, wisely wrote under a pen name, keeping a healthy distance between his playful poetry and his serious refined future as a critic.  Curry was by many accounts an excellent professor at least for the tastes of his period and at the Universities he taught.   Would Curry garner the level of academic stature and support he received 80 years ago today?  Or would he have adapted and still flourished?  Good teachers are generally good story tellers, a timeless quality that affords the individual the ability to adapt to his ever changing listening habits of his audience. 

In my mind The Fugitives are better known for their legacy of scholarly criticism than for their actual poetry.  They were young men, still exploring their bones and figuring out where and how to build their careers.   Their poetry is mingled with a touch of vulnerability.   They were young men, flawed, but thinkers, who left their mark, some of it good, some of it bad.  The same can be said of their poetry.