[Ransom's] appreciation of Allen Tate, written in honor of Tate's sixtieth birthday,… leads us into the heart of his own attitude toward experience. For in this essay Ransom offers the reader a detailed examination of the character of his subject, as much as of his literary achievement. He makes us see what he thinks of Tate not only as a poet and novelist but also as a man, and what he thinks of him is defined in principle in the opening sentence: "The poet, the thinker, the whole man—Allen Tate's personality is greatly distinguished in our time." "The whole man": that is essentially how Ransom presents Tate, and all whom he admires. No praise could be warmer from a person for whom the ideal of human completeness remained a source of continual inspiration—such inspiration, in fact, that it would not be too much to say Ransom's entire work depends on a comparison between this ideal and the sense of fragmentation he associated with more recent events.

Ransom's conception of the whole man does not involve any simplification of experience. On the contrary, its complex and specific nature is constantly emphasized. This is the result, largely, of his belief in the dual nature of the human personality, its indebtedness to both the reason and the sensibility. The reason, as Ransom sees it, man employs in his attempts to understand experience, to discover and use the universal patterns latent in the "world's body." The sensibility on the other hand simply enables him to enjoy experience, the fine qualities of particulars, including all those that cannot be absorbed into any pattern formulated by the rational element. So far what Ransom has to say may sound thoroughly commonplace, a hardly individualized version of a generally held idea. What distinguishes his argument, though, is that he manages to relate this conventional distinction to his comparative analysis of agrarian and industrial societies, and to do so in detail. The thesis that nearly all of his writing sets out to prove, in one way or another, is that only in a traditional and rural society—the kind of society that is epitomized for Ransom by the antebellum South—can the human being-achieve the completeness that comes from exercising the sensibility and the reason with equal ease. With the rise of science and industrialism, the thesis continues, these two elements have become dissociated. Science and industry demand control of nature, and in pursuance of this man has had to exploit his reason and deny his sensibility. The image of the whole man, consequently, has been replaced by a concept of personality that emphasises its "appetitive and economic" functions at the expense of everything else.

In the course of his career Ransom has managed to apply the implications of this change to his analysis of several kinds of human activity, including the broad activities of work and leisure. Labor in a traditional society, for example, is described in essay after essay as performing "one of the happy functions of human life." This, so the argument goes, is because agriculture is the major form of employment in that society; and agriculture satisfies not just the reason of man, by supplying him with the requisite "material product," but his sensibility as well…. For like most of the Agrarians, Ransom insists that the cultural forms characteristic of any particular system are integrally related to the forms of its economic life, and so the "right attitude to nature" that rural labor is said to promote is extended into a definition of its artwork as well. The arts in a traditional community satisfy the two sides of human nature just as its agrarian experience does, in the sense that they demonstrate "the power of the material world to receive a rational structure and still maintain its particularity." Belonging essentially to what is called a "classical" mode of imitation, they manage to reflect both the constant and the contingent elements in life; whereas the artistic forms generated by an urban society cannot help but betray a bias in favor of one element or the other.

An inevitable consequence of Ransom's commitment to the idea of a unity of personality is that his discussion of one function of the consciousness tends to fade imperceptibly into a discussion of its other functions, so his essays on aesthetics are often transformed into essays on ethics about halfway through. And this particular tendency is reinforced by Ransom's own insistence that the only satisfactory system of morality—the kind of system, essentially, that is characteristic of a rural environment—is one that appeals to the aesthetic sense as much as the conscience. The beautiful and the good then become inseparable…. [For example, he maintains that] the traditional man commits himself to the principle of courtship so as to train the instincts and so as to enjoy the subtler forms of pleasure it makes available to him—the detached contemplation of the object of desire, for instance, and the carefully discriminated and graded series of excitements that precede the final union. It is an enormously sophisticated interpretation of the scope of emotional experience…. (pp. 56-8)

Ransom is ingenious enough to extend the imputation of crudity to his analysis of the spiritual differences obtaining between agrarian and urban communities, this despite the fact that it was the charge of religious backwardness and crudity, leveled at the time of the Scopes trial, that initially stimulated his interest in his region. Indeed, there is a touch of characteristic bravado in the way Ransom insists that the very fundamentalism for which the South was mocked is a mark of its achievement. His argument is not a difficult one to grasp, although it is possibly more difficult to swallow. It depends on a rather pragmatic approach to religion, which insists that those varieties of belief are good which promote a "working definition of the relation of man to nature." The more thorough the definition is, apparently, the better the religion until one arrives at that variety which manages to hold in equilibrium two diverse interpretations of the human role—one of which depicts nature as "usable and intelligible," the other of which insists that it is "mysterious and contingent." God, according to this form of belief, can be understood, but only partly. He can be obeyed, and yet still remain mysterious and unpredictable. The ideas are, of course, contradictory. Ransom insists, though, that they can be reconciled in experience because they both grow naturally out of the practice of agriculture…. (p. 58)

[The majority of Ransom's poems] describe the dissociations for which a society expressing itself in "a series of isolated perfections" is responsible. There are, for example, the lovers in "Eclogue," the failure of whose relationship is directly ascribed to the fact that they are "one part love / And nine parts bitter thought." Their lack of inner integrity, the suggestion is, has prevented them from enjoying a complete relationship. And there are the lonely protagonists of so many of the poems, like "Miriam Tazewell," whose alienation stems from an inability to relate the complexities of their interior being to the abbreviated definitions of identity available in the world around them. In these and similar cases an alternative system of value—in which wholeness and consequently an integration of the inner and outer worlds does seem possible—is not made explicit, as it is in the essays. But it is nevertheless there, in the idioms of the verse. This is because poetry at its best, according to Ransom, should devote equal stylistic attention to what he calls "structure" and "texture." By "structure," Ransom explains, he means the totality of the poem, the "logical object or universal" that appeals to the reason; and by "texture" is meant "the tissue of irrelevance" and particularity that caters more to the demands of the sensibility. "A beautiful poem," according to these criteria, "is one that proceeds to the completion of a logical structure, but not without attention to the local particularity of its components." Obviously, Ransom would consider it arrogant to claim that he achieves this beauty in his verse, but it is clear enough that he aims for it. Almost from the beginning of his poetic career, he has tried to articulate a form which involves the simultaneous evocation of contradictory responses, catching the complex and yet unified reaction of the complete man to experience. And where the attempt has been successful, as it has been in many of his poems, the result has been a type of discourse that demonstrates its positives in its methods of expression. (pp. 58-9)

["Antique Harvesters"] is perhaps Ransom's most famous piece, and the fame is, I believe, quite justified. For in it he locates the meaning of his regional experience. He indicates, that is to say, the context of inherited belief on which his own work depends, and establishes the imaginative significance of his region for him—as a place where unity of consciousness is still possible and even likely. The South, in the poem, represents both a resource and a myth; and the poem itself consequently belongs at the center of his life's work. The fact that this is so—that "Antique Harvesters" has a centrality that none of Ransom's other poems possesses—is more or less suggested in the opening lines, which have the density and gravity of ideas brooded over for a very long time…. The poem is set on the banks of the Mississippi during the autumn, a season that as in the Keats ode reminds man of his mortality but also allows him to see that mortality as part of a general cycle of growth and decay. It is too a time of pause, offering him an opportunity to consider his harvest, material and spiritual. One thing gained from the land is suggested by the opening description of the old men, and that is endurance, the mildness of those who are as "dry" and "spare" as the earth they love. Another is suggested by the reference to the raven with its "sable" wings—an intimation of death and human limits, the humility acquired in any engagement with the soil. And, as if this were not enough, the third stanza of the poem introduces something else yielded by the land. For, as the old men talk and the descendants of long generations labor in the field, the sense of a usable past and a traditional life style becomes unavoidable. (pp. 60-1)

With the appearance of the hunters, a new feeling of ritual begins to enrich Ransom's portrait. Certainly, the more romantic associations this feeling dictates are tempered by the mundane detail, but the feeling is still present, and powerful enough to be carried over into the subsequent description of the harvesters. For when the poet returns after a while to these laborers in the field, they are addressed as if they were participants in a rite as well. Their activities, as described in the concluding stanza of the poem, seem to be as decorous and significant as the ceremonial of the chase that interrupted them—the only difference being that in this case the activities are directed toward the honoring of "our lady" the earth rather than a simple fox…. The ending is a thoroughly appropriate one, a convincing demonstration of the scope of Ransom's dualism. It affirms the dignity of the antique harvesters, the sense of decorum and heroism with which their commitment to the land is accepted; and yet it does so without rejecting the original recognition of the facts in the case of the farm laborer, or in the case of any man destined to work and then die. Nothing of that firm grasp on the actual demonstrated by the opening of the poem has been lost, but a great deal has been added to it and gained.

This gain is registered among other things in the staple idiom of the verse, which offers a characteristic reflection in word and manner of the contraries of thought on which the argument depends. The very title, "Antique Harvesters," gives a clue to this, referring as it does both to the concepts of tradition and ritual and to a particular event in the farming year. And throughout the following discourse equal weight is given to these two terms of reference: elevated and romantic metaphors, such as the description of the fox as a "lovely ritualist," are drastically qualified by the "dry, grey, spare" setting in which they appear, and the occasional use of an elegant or archaic word is braced by a sustained commitment to the colloquial. The result, as in a couplet like

    The horse, the hounds, the lank mares coursing by
    Straddled with archetypes of chivalry,

is an interplay of contradictory terms so complex that it almost defies analysis. And of course, that it should defy immediate analysis at least is part of Ransom's intention, since what he wishes to do essentially is to express the possible coexistence of these terms rather than their separateness. Agriculture, the premise is, brings the ceremonious and the mundane levels of experience together by transforming ordinary life into significant ritual. Its activities, and the moral and religious practices it encourages, supply the basis for that sense of tradition and even chivalry that surrounds all those who participate in them. This is the donnée of "Antique Harvesters," making it—to the extent that Ransom succeeds—not so much a portrait from life as a minor historical myth, in which the notion of unity of consciousness is proposed and then firmly attached to the Southern and agrarian idea.

This reading of the rural life, which identifies it at once with the decorous stance and the commonplace gesture, helps to resolve what would otherwise be a puzzling ambivalence in Ransom's agrarian argument—the argument we find developed in his essays. When he is arguing along strictly economic lines, he seems to offer an idea of agrarianism which approximates to the one suggested by the mundane or "low" set of terms in "Antique Harvesters." He insists on the importance of subsistence farming, and even proposes government aid in the form of bounties and free land for those willing to be their own producers and consumers, carpenters and builders. But, when other considerations to do with the quality of life are introduced, he tends to present a more aristocratic image, related to the "high" set of terms used in the poem. Emphasis is then placed on the belief that an agricultural society is a traditional one, promoting quite sophisticated codes of expression and behavior…. [The] self-contradiction is more apparent than real. "Antique Harvesters" demonstrates this more decisively than anything else, because it brings together qualities that Ransom discovered in the agrarian experience and elsewhere tended to deal with separately; its basis in hard work, that is, and the ritualized forms of conduct to which it leads, the onerous details of agricultural labor and the sense of ceremony that this labor fosters. As usual with a writer who delighted in turning his opponents' accusations back upon themselves, the argument is a sophisticated and very deliberate one, but no amount of sophistication can disguise one thing—the fact that its roots are in the Southern inheritance. For what Ransom does essentially in his work is to draw on the idea of the good farmer and that of the fine planter and then devise an imaginative alternative composed of elements from both. His version of the complete man represents a resolution of traditional conflicts—an idea of the good life which depends on his region for much of its content, but on him for its coherence. (pp. 61-3)