They did not necessarily need to see the region in terms of the modernist vision of Pound and Eliot to find a great falling off, an enormous decline in what western civilization makes available for human happiness, or wholeness of being as they might say. But Pound and Eliot were available and Tate among the Fugitives was enthusiastic about them, particularly about Eliot. Till plunged to a heavier world below You shift your sea-space blindly Heaving, turning like the blind crab. Tate's narrator has also obviously become an acquaintance of Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock. They, the applied sciences, are responsible for our fragmentation, our inability to create an order that is suitable and satisfies our needs.
Industrialism is the economic organization of the collective American society.
It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has acquired a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even With the applied sciences their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. The answer to the problem of modem fragmentation for Ransom, Tate and their friends in 1930 was agrarianism. In 1930 and for a while after the Southern Agrarians acted as though they intended to begin a real political reform with their manifesto.