The Best Poems About Nashville (And the Poets Who Made This a Poetry Town)
- Paul Whitten
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
By Nashville Adventures Staff
Ask me for the best poems about Nashville and I'll give you the honest answer first. This ain't a city with a tidy little stack of postcard poems about the skyline and the neon. It's something better than that. Nashville grew some of the most important poets in American history, and a handful of them wrote this city, its dirt and its ghosts, right into the work. Let me walk you through them.
A poetry town hiding in plain sight
People come to Nashville for the guitars. Fair enough. But a few blocks off Broadway, on a campus most visitors never set foot on, a small group of young men changed American poetry in the 1920s.
You can stand downtown today and hear a pedal steel bending through a bar door. Walk west a mile or so and you're near where all that literary history caught fire. Same city. Two kinds of music, really.
That's the thing about Nashville poetry. It doesn't announce itself. You have to go looking for it. So let's look.
The Fugitive Poets: where it all started
At Vanderbilt University, starting informally before World War I and catching fire in the early 1920s, a circle of poets and thinkers began meeting to argue about verse. They called themselves the Fugitives, and from 1922 to 1925 they published a little magazine called The Fugitive. The name was a kind of dare. They wanted poetry that fled the soft, sentimental Southern stuff and stood on real craft instead.
The core four became giants: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and a teenager named Robert Penn Warren. Ransom was the professor. Tate and Warren were students. Together they helped launch modern Southern literature and a whole school of criticism that shaped how poetry got taught in this country for decades. They even ran a Nashville Poetry Prize, and the year a woman named Laura Riding won it, they made her an honorary member.
Here's the honest rough edge, and I won't skip it. By 1930 several of these same men had turned toward a movement called the Agrarians and a book called I'll Take My Stand, a defense of the old rural South that carried some ugly assumptions about race. The poetry and the politics shared the same room. A good guide tells you both.
John Crowe Ransom and a small, devastating elegy
Ransom was the professor, the steady hand the younger men brought their work to. His most famous poem grew straight out of his Nashville years. It's an elegy for a neighbor's little girl who died young, and it refuses to wail. It just sits in that strange hush a sudden death leaves behind in a house.
Read it once and the last image trails you home.
Her wars were bruited in our high window. We looked among orchard trees and beyond Where she took arms against her shadow, Or harried unto the pond -John Crowe Ransom, from "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" (1924)
Donald Davidson and the closest thing to a Nashville poem
If you want a poem that actually wrestles with this city, start with Davidson's long poem "The Tall Men" from 1927. It moves through Nashville and looks hard at the frontier pioneers who founded the place, asking what their grit added up to and what the modern city had become around it. It's Nashville reckoning with its own founders, in verse.
‘Nay’ sayd the lord Persë, ‘I tolde it the beforne, That I wolde never yeldyde be to no man of a woman born.’ -Donald Davidson, from "The Tall Men" (1927)
Davidson stayed the most rooted in Tennessee soil of all of them. He also stayed the most stubborn in his old views, long after the others moved on. Rough edges again.
You can find his best work here.
Robert Penn Warren, my favorite of the whole bunch
I'll admit my bias up front. Of all the Nashville poets, Robert Penn Warren is the one I keep coming back to.
He showed up at Vanderbilt at sixteen, the youngest Fugitive in the room, a farm kid from Guthrie, Kentucky, just over the state line. He left as the most decorated writer the group ever produced. He's still the only person to win a Pulitzer Prize in both fiction, for All the King's Men, and poetry, which he took home twice. In 1986 he became the first Poet Laureate of the United States.
But the awards ain't why he's my favorite. It's what he was always circling. Warren wrote about time, memory, and the way the past refuses to turn loose of you. History as a living weight you carry around, not a plaque you read on a wall.
I'll say this part plain. I spent some years in uniform and some more in the Peace Corps a long way from Tennessee, and you learn out there that the past travels with you whether you invite it or not. Warren put words to that better than almost anybody. A book of his poems fits in a cargo pocket. I'd know.
There's one more reason he matters here, and it's the best one. As a young man, Warren defended segregation in print, and he carried that. But unlike Davidson, he changed. By the 1960s he was driving around the South interviewing civil rights leaders, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X, for a book he called Who Speaks for the Negro? He wrote searching, uncomfortable work about what the Civil War actually left behind, arguing the North walked off with a kind of borrowed righteousness while the South got handed a brutal, clarifying defeat. A man who could change his mind in public and own it on the page. That's rare. That's worth admiring.
His major poems are still under copyright, so I won't reprint them here, but you can read them in full at the Poetry Foundation and at poets.org.
Read a few and you'll see what I mean about the past not letting go.
The poems and poets carrying Nashville now
Nashville poetry didn't pack up and leave when The Fugitive folded. The living scene is wider than those four men ever were, and a lot more representative of who actually lives here.
You've got Major Jackson, a heavyweight poet who teaches at Vanderbilt, walking some of the same halls those Fugitives did. You've got voices like Ciona Rouse and Stephanie Pruitt Gaines writing the real, present day city, not a museum version of it. And every year the Nashville Youth Poet Laureate program, run with the nonprofit Southern Word, hands a teenager a microphone and a civic platform, sending them up to perform at Metro Council meetings and city events.
Here's a quirk I love pointing out on a tour. For all this talent, Nashville named a city poet laureate just once, back in 2006, the late Harriette Bias-Insignares of Tennessee State University, and never really filled that adult seat again. A music capital with a deep poetry bench and an empty laureate chair. Only in Nashville.
The work coming out of slams and pop ups and the Nashville Poetry Festival ain't always polished. Good. Neither was the best of the old stuff. Honesty beats polish every time, on the page and on the sidewalk.
Where to find these poems about Nashville
None of these live behind glass. Ransom's quiet, strange elegies, Davidson's "The Tall Men," Warren's collections, Tate's famous "Ode to the Confederate Dead," they're all out there in libraries and online, waiting on you. One heads up on the Tate: the version everybody quotes is still under copyright, so read it at the source rather than off some random site that got it wrong.
My one piece of advice, as somebody who tells Nashville stories for a living: read a couple of these before you come downtown. Then go walk the actual streets they walked. The Vanderbilt campus. The old neighborhoods. The river that pulled the founders here in the first place. The words land different when your own boots are on the same ground.
That's really the whole idea behind what we do at Nashville Adventures. History you can stand inside, not just read about. If a poem makes you want to see the city the way these writers saw it, our Nashville tours are built for exactly that kind of walk.
Bring the poems. We'll bring the streets.
