Any conventional list of the great modernist poets would begin with Eliot and Pound, Rilke, Valéry, and Rimbaud. These were not the only important poets of their era, possibly not even the greatest. One thinks of such others as Stevens, Frost, Montale, and Yeats. But the ones designated as modernist are credited with changing our whole mode of feeling, the voice and vocation of poetry itself. It is therefore surprising to recall that in 1926 two by no means negligible poets and commentators placed John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) firmly in the ranks of the modernists. Robert Graves and Laura Riding, in their still-valuable Modernist Poetry, say of Ransom's work that it is of a kind which, “because it is too good, has been brushed aside as a literary novelty.” Graves and Riding are no mere crackpots; their book was the inspiration, according to I. A. Richards, of that touchstone of modern criticism, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).

The poetry-reading public of today is not inclined to bracket Ransom with the modernists, despite some eloquent defenses of his work by the likes of Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Geoffrey Hill; and Ransom's work has engendered no such devoted examination as has attended the poetry of Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Pound, or Williams. Indeed, Ransom's poems are still read with a shocking carelessness even by those who purport to admire them. Take, for example, this observation from the headnote to Ransom's poems in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair: “His poem ‘Philomela’ describes how, ‘pernoctating’ once with Oxford students in Bagley Wood, he heard a nightingale's song and was unimpressed.” (So greatly do I revere the critical acumen of the late Mr. Ellmann that I have laid the blame for this comment, whether fairly or not, at the door of his colleague.) This has about it, in my view, the same flavor of blissful incomprehension reported by Matthew Arnold in his essay “Science and Literature”: “I once mentioned in a school-report, how a young man in one of our English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in Macbeth beginning, ‘Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?’ turned this line into ‘Can you not wait upon the lunatic?’”

Ransom was a Rhodes Scholar, and by “pernoctating” (passing the night) he means only, and with becoming modesty, that his Oxford sojourn was briefer than that of others. The poem, as a thoughtful perusal ought to make clear, is not about the experience of hearing a nightingale in Oxford but about the radical break of American culture from its classical parentage, of which the nightingale myth, represented by Philomela and derived from Ovid, is a lovely but antique and conventionalized representative. Ransom is asserting that the old European tricks won't serve us anymore; in this he is adopting a stance we recognize in the work of Williams and Pound—and indeed of Eliot himself, who wrote of “the change of Philomel” as a “withered stump of time.” When Ransom writes of Philomela's “fairy numbers” he means to recall Keats, and to imply that we can no longer get away with those Romantic stage props or that Keatsean mellifluousness. When he writes of her “fabulous provinces” he means that, for better or worse, the world we now live in has pretty well banished the “fabulous.” Stevens was destined to take up the same theme.

Ransom is sometimes called an ironist, and compared to Hardy. The characterization is fractionally useful: Ransom admired Hardy, and edited his Selected Poems. Both, moreover, employed pronounced archaisms and antiquated diction. Hardy did so out of love for modes of rural English speech that were disappearing in the course of his very long life. But Ransom does so for quite other reasons. His poems very often present painful anachronisms that endure beyond the hope of resolution: codes of outdated morality applied almost laughably to a modern or heedless world; lovers torn by an equation of desire and ethics so perfectly balanced that they are like the proverbial donkey simultaneously attracted by two bales of hay, identical in their diametrically opposed distance from him and attraction to him, so that unable to choose, he dies of starvation midway between them. The effect is both ludicrous and pathetic, and it is this special emotional cocktail of contradictory ingredients, powerful and paradoxical, that forbids a simple response to many of Ransom's poems, that continues to puzzle and to charm, and that firmly distinguishes him from Hardy.

A poem such as “Captain Carpenter” is predicated on the notion that the ideals of courtesy, chivalry, and gentlemanliness can never survive against the barbarity they are pledged to oppose, since survival would entail abandoning those very ideals and adopting the brutal ways of the enemy. And into this world of irreconcilable paradoxes are always born the innocent, children and lovers, to whom the paradoxes are more bewildering than even to us, the poet's worldly and knowing readers. Ransom is telling us that, for all our worldliness and his, we were once as ill-equipped to cope with the world's welter of contradictions as the innocent; that in fact our worldliness is largely a matter of self-delusion; and when the heart of the matter is truly seen, we are as nonplussed as the veriest child. “Nonplussed” is a condition (if not a word) that Ransom is particularly gifted at eliciting in his readers, as well as describing in his poems. “Brown study” is a phrase he made powerful use of. What distinguishes his poems is a mixture of elegance and bluntness, a deep respect for innocence and the codes forged to protect it, along with a refusal to give way to any romantic or archaic delusions. It is always and disconcertingly, dramatically, dialectically, a bifocal poetry.