“Poor Naked Wretches”: The Wound of the Ordinary in Agee and Warren
“Poor Naked Wretches”: The Wound of the Ordinary in Agee and Warren

Summary/Abstract: The pastoral figure of the small farmer in the writings of the Nashville Agrarians and other southern modernists gave expression to a conservative metaphysics of the soil, one that underpinned the unitary, organic notion of “the South” in the interwar decades. This agrarian figure of the “harvester” was subsequently criticised by two southern radicals, James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and Robert Penn Warren in “Blackberry Winter” (1946). Both Agee’s cotton tenants and Warren’s tramp show how any southern poetics of the earth had to take account of the intrusion of economic depression and world war into the region. Agee’s work is particularly incisive and close to the European avant-garde in that he envisages the ruined agricultural families of Alabama through a perspective close to Georges Bataille’s sociology of the sacred and Maurice Blanchot’s theory of the inoperative community.

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