IT Is ONLY in the second phase of Fugitive development that
we are enabled to define clearly the Ransom influence which
had so dominated the first year that two able critics assumed
he had written the whole of the two anonymous numbers of the
magazine. For only under the challenge of a new model, which
Tate's discovery of T. S. Eliot introduced, was Ransom led to
define his ideological and aesthetic commitments.

Early Ransomism was both a manner of thinking and a
manner of expression. The thinking was eminently rational and
sharply realistic, but sensitively alive to human and natural
values. Deeply aware of the ineradicable evils of death and
decay as the central facts about the human condition, his mind
could hold this knowledge at a safe distance while the senses
discreetly indulged themselves and the spectacle of human
gallantries and human foibles passed before it. His poetic
stance was somewhat aloof from the little dramas he preferred
to expose in a tone of mild and sympathetic irony. The poetry
itself was mannered and often deceptively gay. Constructed
in traditional patterns, it relied for its effects on sharp images,
neat surprises of diction, and careful modulations of tone. It
avoided all pretentiousness, all clichés of phrase and attitude,
and all vagueness of structure or of metaphysics. It provided
a difficult model to imitate well, if an easy one to follow
superficially, but it offered a highly effective humanist discipline
for the excesses of young poetic talent.

I have indicated that Ransom's earliest Fugitive poems were
by no means uniformly successful. There is often an arti-
ficiality and strain about them or a mocking irony that fails to