Cousin Lucius

The Southern version of Thoreau’s Walden may be considered I’ll Take by Stand, by Twelve Southerners, with its subtitle, The South and the Agrarian Tradition.  It was published in 1930 and met with considerable criticism from those who believed it was a futile effort to “turn back the clock” to an idealized utopia of the antebellum South.  On the contrary, it was a cautionary tale of the mindless materialism of modern man in the industrial age—the agrarian versus industrial conflict was really a metaphor of the man versus machine conflict.   The 12 Southerners ponder the same questions as Thoreau: what are we living for, what is the good life, what are our material and spiritual needs? 

While my brother, Clifford, and I attended Vanderbilt University, it hosted “Fifty Years After, A symposium on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Agrarian Manifesto. October 30 and 31, November 1, 1980.”  Three of the original 12 essayist attended, Lyle Lanier, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and Robert Penn Warren, the poet—perhaps the most famous, along with the poets John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate who were deceased.  I had the program framed.  It was still in the air. 

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