Fugitive Poets Gather In Tribute to Ransom

Fugitive-and other-poetry reading will mark this weekend at the Summer School as local poets gather in Lamont Forum Room tomorrow afternoon at 2:30 p.m. to pay tribute to Fugitive John Crowe Ransom in his 70th year. Ransom himself will give a public reading tonight at 8:30 p.m. in Sanders Theatre.

Though the Kenyon poet's reading this evening is open to all free of charge, the talk and forum tomorrow is open only to those holding passes. These may be obtained from Miss Venuti in Weld Hall 2b, as long as spaces are available in the Forum Room.

Ransom is one of the foremost members of the group of poets who founded the Fugitive magazine, a publication which flourished in Nashville, Tenn., from 1922 to 1925. The movement was a reaction against the excess intellectualism of Northern poets. As one critic has noted, the Tennessee poets "reaffirmed for the Southern poets the right to sing of nature, harmony, metaphysics." They sought, the critic notes, a "dreamy sentimentalism and provincial elegy." This movement began among students at the University of Tennessee, and included, along with Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Laura Riding, Merrill Moore, Sidney Metron Hirsch, and--familiar to members of the Summer School--Allen Tate and William Yandell Elliott.

The group disbanded in 1926, and officers of the Summer School expect tomorrow's forum to be something of a reunion. Ranson, Warren and Elliott will attend, along with Robert Lowell and William Alfred.