In Tennessee: The Last Garden

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Old age is the best disguise. When Robert Penn Warren came to Vanderbilt University in the early 1920s, fresh off the farm in Gutherie, Ky., he looked like a poet. A city poet, after the style of T.S. Eliot. Glossy shoes. Handkerchief triangulated in the jacket pocket. Fingers exquisitely laced for the camera. Now, at 75, with over 50 years of poetry behind him—not to mention, a good deal of fiction, including All the King's Men—"Red" Warren looks like a farmer.

Seated on the stage of Vanderbilt's Underwood Auditorium, simultaneously slicked up and rumpled in his Sunday best, he could pass for a stranger who got lost on his way to the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville's other landmark. His mouth has the patient downturn of one who has endured flood and drought, and can survive this occasion too. When he speaks to the overflow audience, resolutely ignoring the mike, his parched hills-and-hollows drawl has the rasp of red dust in the throat on a July afternoon.

Red Warren is a Rhodes scholar, a classicist, and the South's answer to Robert Frost. He is swapping reunion talk with two other farm hands from central casting, Psychologist Lyle Hicks Lanier and Novelist Andrew Nelson Lytle. These three men are all that is left of a famous band of twelve Southerners, a lot of them poets, a lot of them from Vanderbilt, who 50 years ago published an alternately brilliant and baffling manifesto called I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.

In the years since, over 150 doctoral theses (in French and Japanese as well as English) have tried to explain exactly what those dozen splendidly provoking essays meant. This three-day gathering, half birthday party, half academic cracker-barrel session, has added a second question: Why do the Agrarians, with their crusty prophecies and affirmations, still sound so pertinent, half of a very non-agrarian century later?

Today the silo has become something likely to house a nuclear missile. But even in the 1920s, the Agrarians were behind their times. Words Like honor, magnanimity and Tradition with a capital T rise from the pages of I'll Take My Stand. In the midst of the noisy bash of the jazz age, the writers deplore the decline of "manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love." While Yankee highbrows like E.E. Cummings and Edmund Wilson were discovering the seven lively arts, the Agrarians were frowning on movies and imploring the yeomen of Tennessee to switch off their Atwater Kent radios, take down that country fiddle from the wall and scrape out an Elizabethan air. Their best poet, John Crowe Ransom, magically evoked a land where larks' tongues are never stilled, "sunlight lies like pale spread straw" and ladies of "beauty and high degree" arrange jasmine in vases, as courtly gentlemen pace the veranda. "Turn your eyes to the immoderate past," Agrarian Allen Tate advised in his best poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead.