Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Moore, Marianne (Vol. 19) - John Crowe Ransom

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JOHN CROWE RANSOM

[Mr. T. S. Eliot] is a major voyager on one stream of modernity with which we have a good acquaintance, but it is not the pellucid stream that Miss Moore is embarked upon.

I should wonder if Mr. Eliot does not do Miss Moore a disservice when he raises the question of the "greatness" of her work, even though he raises it provisionally as one to be answered finally by the judgment of generations later than her own generation. Greatness is something for the kind of poetry in which he practices, perhaps, but it would seem beyond the intention of her kind, and so foreign to it that if I am not mistaken she would be the first to repel the idea. For this reason: that in our judgment of personages and their accomplishments we attribute greatness to those that take their impulse out of more primitive or heroic occasions than she is concerned with.

Let us compare her kind of human interest with that, for example, of Marcus Cato, the countryman...

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1. Introduction
2. Ezra Pound
3. Harriet Monroe
4. T. S. Eliot
5. John Crowe Ransom
6. Lloyd Frankenberg
7. Louise Bogan
8. Randall Jarrell
9. Hugh Kenner
10. Brad Leithauser
11. Helen Vendler
12. Hilton Kramer
13. Copyright