The Fugitives, a group of poets from Nashville, Tennessee, led the vanguard for modernist verse in the South in the 1920s. In contrast to the Imagist movement centered in England, the Fugitives emphasized traditional poetic forms and techniques, and their poems developed intellectual and moral themes focusing on an individual’s relationship to society and to the natural world. The Fugitive group met relatively briefly, from the end of World War I to the late 1920s, and they published a journal of verse, the Fugitive, for only three years (1922–25). As poets, fiction writers, social critics, and literary theorists, however, the leading members of the group—John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren—have had an enormous impact on modern literature. This is the bound collection of the Fugitive.