In his new anthology of essays, The Southern Critics, which features the likes of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, Glenn C. Arbery claims that the Southern Critics “have been neglected” and I agree.[1] When they have been noticed, he says, “they have usually been faulted for not having the sensibilities that are now de rigueur, or they have been located politically in a strain of American conservatism that Eugene Genovese calls ‘the Southern tradition.’” Arbery’s aim is “to bring their writing before a new generation of readers who can see them afresh and judge for themselves.” But it is hard to see them afresh, now that their formative writings are nearly a century old: they must be seen historically. I’ll try to suggest how this might be done by concentrating on the “Agrarians” and, in particular, on John Crowe Ransom, whose career was exemplary.

T. S. Eliot spent the academic year 1932–3 at Harvard, as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. His lectures were published in November 1933 as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. After his year at Harvard, he journeyed to Charlottesville—making his first visit—to give the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia. These were published in 1934 under the title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. They have not been reprinted. Eliot soon came to believe that he was a