In the years before his death in 1974, John Crowe Ransom was frequently mentioned in the same breath as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Frost as one of the great American poets of the 20th century. Ransom himself knew that this was an overly generous association; his reputation was founded mostly on two books of poems published nearly a half-century earlier, and even these, he always insisted, were in several senses “minor.”
And yet Ransom had formed the sensibility of two generations of writers and readers. After (mostly) giving up poetry, he began a long career as literary philosopher, whose interventions on religion, cultural politics, and, above all, the theory of poetry would become the common sense of his age. It is with us still. If you have ever wished that teachers of literature would stop enslaving the great works of our tradition to advance their crazy political agendas and would return to helping students to read with reverence, patience, and attention, you are doubtless recalling the practices of the New Criticism, which Ransom helped to establish.
The son and grandson of Methodist ministers, Ransom was the first son of a family of modest means but upward mobility. He attended the Bowen School in Nashville, one of several academies that prepared young Tennesseans for admission to Vanderbilt. He matriculated there at the age of 15, although he took a year off to teach high school Greek and Latin to help with the family finances. After graduation at the head of his class, Ransom taught for another year and then accepted a Rhodes scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, to study classics and philosophy.
Only after his return to the United States did Ransom give much attention to literature; but that was sufficient, it seems, to get him hired into the Vanderbilt English department, where he would teach, with the exception of two years’ military service in World War I, for more than two decades. There, he brought fame to Vanderbilt as one of the leaders of the Fugitives, a small group of writers whose poems, fiction, and essays in criticism would become classics of Southern letters.
While in France, Ransom learned that his first book, Poems about God (1919), had been selected by Robert Frost for publication with Henry Holt and Company. To have Frost as a reader was fortuitous, for Ransom’s early poems display a cutting irony, a plainness of style, and homeyness of subject matter that made him seem a Southern counterpart to the New England farmer, classicist, and poet. “Noonday Grace” begins this way:
The poem proceeds like this for pages, each stanza swallowed up with only one rhyme sound, and one soon hears the poet’s sincere goodwill to parents and God cut through with irony and doubt:
The early poems document the use of the word “God” as poetic in the sense that it is uttered in myriad circumstances in our lives and is expressive at once of our various interior moods and of the “ultimate mystery” beyond us. By the time they were published, Ransom saw the book as a quaint beginner’s effort. His engagement with other Fugitives, especially his student Allen Tate, taught Ransom to strain his sensibility through the emergent conventions of literary modernism. Encountering, yet disliking, Eliot’s The Waste Land would harden Ransom’s style and sharpen its intellectual irony.
Even in his Oxford days, Ransom was coming to see his own life story as a prototype for the sons of the modern South, and of the West more generally. Methodist Christianity had begun as a kind of “fundamentalism,” a faith born of the fear of a thunderous God. Protestantism had stripped away God’s thunder, however, and given us a mild and friendly Christ instead. Little by little, Ransom would complain to Tate, “the God of the Jews has been whittled down into the spirit of science, or the spirit of love, of the spirit of Rotary; and now religion is not religion at all, but a purely secular experience, like Y.M.C.A. and Boy Scouts.”
This complacent “romanticism,” the religion of his fathers, had robbed him of his fear, he believed; but the love of Christ, too, would be taken away as he studied Kant’s philosophy and the technical achievements of modern science. Passing by fundamentalism and romanticism, he came to dwell in what he called a “third moment,” that of an “adult mind” that realizes the value of both the “dualism” of the creature’s fear of God and the “monism” of the romantic spirit.
Though he cannot simply share in them, he mourns their loss and refuses to let them entirely go. One must be a “dualist,” divided within oneself between naïveté and disillusion, between fear and love, between the secular scientific hunger for “efficiency” and the indissoluble religious desire to accept the world as an “aesthetic object”—that is, as a whole, irreducibly complex, body crafted by God. For Ransom, this is what it meant to live aright in the modern world.
His mature poems read, in part, as exercises in seeing the whole by cataloging its irreconcilable divisions. “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” his best-known poem, depicts a little girl of zest and life, chasing geese around the farmyard, only to confront us with her little body in a coffin, Lying so primly propped. A later poem, “Dead Boy,” depicts a grieving family, holding its sincere pain up against the unexceptional qualities of the lost child, who was like a pig with a pasty face. . . . Squealing for cookies, kinned by poor pretense / With a noble house. My personal favorite remains “Miriam Tazewell,” a poem about a genteel woman who, having seen what the storm has done to her geraniums, comes to view “the whole world” as “villain.”
Ransom’s belief was that rhyme and meter loaded the “scientific” or logical meaning of a poem with alogical chains. Thus, his lines were intended to convey not the “sweet” music passed down from Shakespeare to the Romantics but, rather, a clattering artifice that falls all over itself. At his best, as in “Necrological” and “Judith of Bethulia,” he juxtaposes holiness and beauty with violence and disappointment. Sometimes he even manages to weave one within the other in a single line, as in The lords of chivalry lay prone and shattered and a wandering beauty is a blade out of its scabbard.
His dualistic vision balanced in about 150 poems, Ransom quit writing them. In the subsequent decades, he would elaborate it in the forms of psychological, political, and finally literary theory. His books God Without Thunder (1930), The World’s Body (1938), and The New Criticism (1941) are valuable in themselves, but are better read as posterior efforts to prepare an audience for the poems he had long since written than as definitive pronouncements on the condition of the modern West.
If the principles of literary criticism Ransom gave us live on in common sense, they have been driven from the mainstream of the academy. And so it is hard to say whether readers will continue to find reward in the study of his poems. That it took so long to get them collected and properly edited, as Ben Mazer has done here, is not a promising sign. And yet, their deliberately awkward concatenations of clunky and solemn music,
of innocence and experience, and of Anglophile intelligence with “fundamentalist” savagery, their one part love / And nine parts bitter thought, will continue to startle anyone capable of being startled.
James Matthew Wilson, associate professor of humanities and Augustinian traditions at Villanova, is the author, most recently, of a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things.
