Southern Agrarians

The Southern Agrarians were a group of American writers, based principally at Vanderbilt University and including several former members of the earlier Fugitive poets circle, who published the manifesto collection I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition in 1930, defending a traditional, agrarian Southern way of life against the industrialization and cultural homogenization they saw sweeping the modernizing United States. Its contributors included the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, the poet Allen Tate, the novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren and the historian and biographer Donald Davidson, several of whom went on to become central figures of the New Criticism in American literary scholarship. Though its explicit social and economic program had little lasting practical influence and has been criticized for romanticizing the antebellum South, the group's associated literary output is generally treated as a founding current of the broader Southern Renaissance in twentieth-century American letters.