Malvasi analyzes the distinct approaches Ransom, Tate, and Davidson took on such issues as rural poverty, religion, race relations, and the effects of the New Deal on the twentieth-century South. The influence that their poetry and views on literature had on their social and political thought is convincingly illustrated, as is each man's views on the role of the writer in the modern world.

Tate maintained that the South preserved many of the values that the Agrarians had long advocated. By the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1950, however, he believed that history had to be subordinate to Christian dogma and revelation. Davidson held an almost mystical view of the South; he found tradition inadequate to comprehend what he saw as the unity of the living, the dead, and the unborn. Ransom abandoned Agrarianism by the late 1930s to focus on his poetry and the Republic of Letters.

His ultimate acceptance of an industrial-capitalist modernity separated him in a fundamental way from both Davidson and Tate. The conflicting images of southern history and tradition presented in The Unregenerate South serve to explain the disparities among Ransom, Tate, and Davidson in the spheres of literature, society, religion, and race.