The Fugitives, also known as the Fugitive Poets, is the name given to a group of poets and literary scholars at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who published a literary magazine from 1922 to 1925 called The Fugitive. The group, primarily driven by Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate, formed a major school of twentieth century poetry in the United States. The group has some overlap with two later movements: Southern Agrarians and New Criticism. They met as a poetry workshop with no formal connection with the university. After a couple of years, Hirsch felt their poetry was good enough to publish. Allen Tate stated, "...a Fugitive was quite simply a Poet: the Wanderer, or even the Wandering Jew, the Outcast, the man who carries the secret wisdom around the world". Other members include Sidney Mttron Hirsch, Stanley P. Johnson, James M. Frank, Jesse Ely Wills, Walter Clyde Curry, Alec B. Stevenson, William Yandell Elliott, and William Frierson.
In "The Briar Patch", Robert Penn Warren provided a look at the life of an exploited black person in urban America. "The Briar Patch" was a defense both of segregation, and of the doctrine of "separate but equal," enshrined by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). (Warren later recanted the views expressed in "The Briar Patch".) Less closely associated with the Fugitives were the critic Cleanth Brooks and the poet Laura Riding.
The Fugitives partly overlapped with a later group, also associated with Vanderbilt, called the Agrarians. Some of the Fugitives were part of the latter group. Another group known as the New Critics, was a later school that emerged from the Fugitives, named for Ransom's 1941 book, The New Criticism.