SOURCE: Brooks, Cleanth. “John Crowe Ransom: As I Remember Him.” The American Scholar 58 (spring 1989): 211-33.

Every poet to some degree reveals himself in his poetry, from the most frantic “confessional” poet who makes it a point of honor to tell all, on to the most reserved of our classical poets who prefer to keep their personal affairs to themselves. John Crowe Ransom was not interested in providing confessions, but three of his poems in particular served to make revelations of his personal life. “Tom, Tom the Piper's Son” is a good example. (I quote here the original title and text, which I prefer to the new title and revised text that he printed in his Selected Poems in 1974.)

Grim in my little black coat as the sleazy beetle,
And gone of hue,
Lonely, a man reputed for softening little,
Loving few—
Mournfully going where men assemble, unfriended, pushing
With laborious wares,
And glaring with little grey eyes at whom I am brushing,
Who would with theirs—
Full of my thoughts as I trudge here and trundle yonder,
Eyes on the ground
Tricked by white birds or tall women into no wonder,
And no sound—

Even here the “confession” is that he has gained the reputation of keeping his own counsel. As the poem develops we find that this grim little man who seems almost conscientiously nondescript is actually ambitious, proud, and passionate, and the poem thus quickly develops into a fresh and sharply featured descant on the irony of outward appearance masking inner reality, and so applies to many of us. But I am interested here in the way in which the poet in a mood of ironic self-deprecation sets forth the way in which he feels he must appear to the world around him: the little glaring grey eyes, the sense of being the withdrawn and reticent man, the born loner, inattentive of others, a man whose emotions are bottled up inside him, a little scuttling beetle of a man.

The poem is a caricature of the small, stocky (though not pudgy), trim gentleman that Ransom was, but caricatures in their overstatement do convey some positive truths.

Another poem, this time more directly revelatory of his poetry, is the charming “Agitato ma non troppo,” which prefaces the volume Chills and Fever (1924). Again, I prefer the more compact original version.

The poet acknowledges

I have a grief …

But the poem has none of the august majesty of a great mature poet nor the poignance of a passionate young poet. It is not

                                                                      like Dante's fury
When Beatrice was given him to bury;

nor does it resemble the note sounded

          When the young heart was hit, you know
How Percy Shelley's reed sang tremolo. …

Ransom develops the theme a little further and then concludes the poem:

I will be brief,
Assuredly I have a grief,
And I am shaken; but not as a leaf.

This poem provides an accurate account of the tonality and range of Ransom's poetry—the emotion is there, very real, completely genuine, credible, but the poet is never overmastered by it: the poet, one feels, is always in control of himself. If the label “a great minor poet” be not a contradiction in terms, and I think that it is not, it fits Ransom perfectly.

The validation of this description, if challenged, could be supported by the citation of poem after poem. I think that the case at this date requires no argument, though I mean later in this essay to provide some illustrations of the way in which the irony or pathos or simple quiet happiness of a human situation is convincingly rendered.

At this point, however, I want to mention a third poem in which Ransom confesses to a special and, by many an unsuspected, trait: his tendency to criticize the conventional wisdom, to question the dominant orthodoxy. Ten lines will illustrate. The poet imagines others saying:

“He crieth on our dogmas, Counterfeit!
And no man's bubble 'scapeth his sharp thorn.
“Nor he respecteth duly our tall steeple,
But solitary poring on his book,
Heareth our noise and hardly offereth look,
Nor liveth neighbourly with these the people.”
With reason, friends, I am complained upon,
Who am a headstrong man, sentenced from birth
To love unusual gods beyond all earth,
And the easy gospels bruited hither and yon.

This may come as an unexpected revelation to those who think of Ransom as the mannerly, indeed quite courtly, Southern gentleman, who became the stout defender of what many Americans thought a hopelessly provincial culture.

Yet his sharp differences in ideas and attitudes from the Southern culture he sought to defend and on occasion from the notions of his closest friends ought to be noted. I shall have special occasion to refer to it later in this essay. His independence of familial and tribal beliefs, even when he felt strongly the filial and tribal bond, seems to me one of his salient traits. He would in effect later repudiate the religion of his father, a Methodist clergyman, and yet at the same time revere his father and his father's office, and he would further the intellectual careers of his young protégés, like myself, while at the same time pointing out the limitations of their intellectual positions and their disagreements with his. Such was a triumph of good nature and loving concern over what must have been often an intellectual exasperation, but it never involved a softening of the rigor of his own position.

Such personal traits as these poems reveal to me now were not evident to me when I first encountered Ransom on the campus of Vanderbilt University. As for his personal appearance and manner, yes: the little grey eyes, the trim figure of a man just below early middle age and the sense of a person reserved and even rather remote—all of these thoroughly applied to him. But I had no sense of the inner man with his tremendous intellectual energy and his great gifts of the imagination.

This first conception or rather misconception remained even after he had become one of my teachers at Vanderbilt and remained through much of my college career. In due time I did indeed come to admire Ransom's poetry, and today I regard him as one of the finest minor poets writing in the English language of our century. Yet I never felt that I understood him—or even knew with anything like full comprehension the inner man.

I believe if Mr. Ransom had known this, it might have surprised him. For he was later to say that he and I were as much alike as peas in a pod: we were both the sons of Methodist preachers. We had both grown up in Tennessee. Both had got early a solid training in Latin, Greek, and mathematics—all in the tradition of the Old South, which resembled that of the English public schools.

We had both attended and received our B.A.'s from Vanderbilt University and had both gone on to Oxford as Rhodes Scholars. We had both ended up in English departments in universities in the South that did not in those days set any excessive valuation on instructors who taught a subject as commonplace and to their eyes as unimportant as “English.”

So much for our likeness in nurture and cultural background. Here Ransom's homely metaphor, “peas in a pod,” makes entire sense. As I reread Gentleman in a Dust Coat, Daniel Young's biography of Ransom, I pick up other details of Ransom's early life that match easily with those of my own.

Thus, we had shared a life of genteel poverty in a Methodist parsonage in those days; the necessary counting of pennies; the worry when mid-autumn arrived and the pastoral appointments were read out and our family found out that we would stay on at least one more year in the town in which we were then living and would not have to move a hundred miles away, with new friends to make and a new school to attend. We also acquired a fierce family loyalty and a concern for, and a participation in, the problems that our mother and father had to face.

In reading Young's biography I even found mention of actual people whom I knew who had also touched John Ransom's life. For instance, at Oxford, Ransom, as Young tells us, took to lunch one day a “Miss Ann Hefley, daughter of a Methodist minister from Memphis.” Her father was one of my father's good friends, and as a six-year-old child I remember “Miss Hefley.” It was indeed a small world, pretty much their own, that the sons and daughters of Southern Methodist parsons inhabited.

So in spite of what Ransom and I later grew up to be and in spite of the vast differences of talent and achievement between us, I ought to have been able to understand him rather well. But I did not and I do not now. I still have to say what Donald Davidson said to Allen Tate, both friends of Ransom: “I have never been able to understand that man. …” Davidson, after all, as Ransom's associate and colleague for years, had had a better opportunity to observe him than I had had.

Yet Ransom, whether I now understand him or not, made an enormous impression on my life and in a variety of ways, although he was not always aware of it. In the classroom, however, he influenced me hardly at all. I signed up for one of his classes in my second year at Vanderbilt, but within a week I dropped the course, for it was plain that I was not up to it and besides it did not interest me. Later I did take a course in writing with him, and I must have learned something, but except for various remarks that I remember having heard him make, only a few of which had anything to do with the writing process, I am not conscious now of having carried anything away from his instruction.

My experience was thus very different from Robert Penn Warren's experience in which there was apparently an almost instant meeting of minds between the precious young freshman and the poet just approaching his great productive years. Warren has frequently spoken of that most fruitful association and the ease with which it came about.

I have no one to blame but myself, for the difficulty obviously lay in me. Perhaps “blame” is not the accurate term. Again, let me say, I was simply not up to it—too raw, still too confused about my aims and purposes. But again, other students shared my difficulty. Ransom set no great store by formal lectures, and he made no pretensions to being an inspiring teacher. His comments on the literary work being discussed were deliberately kept in low key. He was at his best in talking to the individual when some sort of personal relation had been established. It was not a matter of Ransom's indifference and certainly contained no element of intellectual arrogance. He simply knew that one could not force the horses to drink even if the waters to which the typically wild, young colt had been led were those issuing from the true Pierian spring. The process of teaching had to be in some real sense a participation, a shared slaking of a real thirst. I was not to discover all this until some years later in 1931 when I had my first real conversations with him while I was at Oxford and he and his family were spending a year in England.

Nevertheless, his very presence on the Vanderbilt campus in the 1920s was a powerful influence on my plans for the future. For in my last year at prep school, I had begun to discover poetry, and now to find at Vanderbilt that real live people were writing and publishing poetry settled matters for me. I wanted to be connected in some way with this marvelous romantic enterprise. John Crowe Ransom was a practicing poet. Never mind that he didn't look in the least like the pictures of Byron or Shelley. Never mind either that I could not for the life of me make anything of his poetry. (My training and personal impulses prepared me for only the romantics.)

There were, of course, other incitements than Ransom. There was Donald Davidson, who was also a poet and whose brother for one year was my roommate. Davidson was clearly some kind of romantic. Most important of all there was Robert Penn Warren, whom I was fortunate enough to have met in my freshman year. Warren was, as a student, actually publishing poetry and, out of pure kindness, had taken some notice of me. Our relationship at Vanderbilt was brief. He was off to graduate school at the end of my freshman year. But for me it was important, and indeed it was to bear quite unexpected fruit many years later.

In my own senior year, I at last began to grow up. I had found among my classmates other students who had literary interests. We set to work to collect and edit and get printed a little volume of student verse. We confided what we were doing to Ransom and Davidson, the principal Fugitives still on the Vanderbilt faculty, and got their blessing, but the relation scarcely amounted to anything like intimacy. We knew it did not and did not presume upon it. Ransom, for example, had shown us a kindly interest, but to me he was still a rather remote presence.

I did come to some understanding of his poetry, however. It happened easily and suddenly. I was in a friend's dormitory room one evening, rather idly chatting when I opened a volume of Ransom's poetry lying there on the table before me and started reading—really reading, for I had gone over the poems many times before. Suddenly, the scales fell from my eyes. The code was broken, the poems became “readable.” I do not mean that they became magically transparent. I continue to find fresh meanings in them and depths I had not noticed before. But a serious blockage had suddenly disappeared. I was now a true convert.

Two years later in 1929 when at Oxford I met up with Warren again, we had much talk about Ransom, and I learned for the first time of the plans to publish the collection of essays that appeared in 1930 with the title I'll Take My Stand. Warren was at that time working on his own contribution to it.

I already knew or later came to know all but one of the contributors. I read the book over and over. I found some of the essays more congenial and some more difficult than others. But I tried my best to assimilate the whole position, philosophical and political. I learned a great deal from my intensive study.

I doubted that the book had any future as a political instrument. I was well aware of the incredulous jeers it would provoke. One of the most important things that the reception of the book taught me was the commitment of the American public, north and south, east and west, to progress as a sacred dogma, the truth of which simply could not be questioned. It was one of those truths so plainly self-evident that it could not be rationally discussed. The person who could not wholeheartedly assent to it was either teasing or else touched in the head, or perhaps, if he still persisted, a real subversive.

Ransom's essay was one of the most philosophical expositions in the collection, and, to my mind, one of the most able as a well-constructed argument. It represented him at his very best as a thinker and as a stylist. He was also the principal author, as I was later to learn, of the “Introduction: A Statement of Principles.” This short account manifests the same virtues as his essay: clarity and force. Here is Ransom on industrialism and its labor-saving devices.

But a fresh labor-saving device introduced into an industry does not emancipate the laborers in that industry so much as it evicts them.

Such has proved to be a sound observation. One of the most obvious results has been in agriculture. Some fifty years ago about 40 percent of our population worked on farms; now, the farm workers are under 10 percent. In general, more of our people are now at work in distributing and marketing products than in actually producing them. The shift has been praised for eliminating much heavy manual work, much that is sheer drudgery. But desk work can be a form of drudgery, too, and much of it is.

Two more of Ransom's statements touch on this problem.

It is an inevitable consequence of industrial progress that production greatly outruns the rate of natural consumption. To overcome the disparity, the producers, disguised as the pure idealists of progress, must coerce and wheedle the public into being loyal and steady consumers, in order to keep the machines running. So the rise of modern advertising—along with its twin, personal salesmanship—is the most significant development of our industrialism.

The regular act of applied science is to introduce into labor a labor-saving device or a machine. Whether this is a benefit depends on how far it is advisable to save labor.

Again, the elimination of drudgery seems generally a gain; but the value of time saved from labor will depend very much on how the saved time is spent. If the worker is left only with time to kill, or with a life that is boring, or with only shallow and superficial amusements to pass the time, he is really little better off. If his work is interesting, it can be enjoyable. A true artist will “work” at his art even if he doesn't need the money he can get for it. Fortunate is the man whose job provides a decent living but who also has a job that he likes to do. Yet such statements as I have quoted from Ransom's “Introduction” could not be popular. In a society so thoroughly committed to secularism and progress as ours was by 1930, they could not appeal to the man in the street—nor, as a matter of fact, to the intellectuals. Mechanization had indeed taken command.

An acute observer of our contemporary culture, Eric Voegelin, has remarked that “the contemplative critics of Western Culture had discerned the disintegration of society behind the facade of progress” and that “the progress of science and industry is no substitute for the order of society.” But such contemplative critics, few if any of whom are on the political left, usually turn out to be poets and men of letters, writers like Paul Valéry, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and, though this name may come as a surprise to some, William Faulkner.

They have been impressed with the basically unchanging character of human nature throughout the ages. They were never deluded into the notion that science (the “hard sciences” using an objective method for testing hypotheses and capable of making accurate predictions) could deal with ends and goals. Applied science, technology, could indeed provide the most efficient means to reach predetermined goals. But it could not as science select the proper goals. Marxism did not attract such thinkers as these, though in the thirties it did attract to one degree or another most of the other intellectuals.

Consequently, few people of the period were able to see (or are able to see now) the real point that Ransom and his fellow Agrarians were making. The Agrarians never questioned the ability of a technological society to produce goods for the consumer but were much concerned with the bearing of a technological society on the nature of the good life. They asked that we consider what the good life is or ought to be.

This matter is almost completely overlooked. It was assumed that any fool knew what the good life was. He at least knew what he wanted. Give him an abundance of material goods and he was free to choose for himself. The nature of the good life—the importance of a choice of goals and ends—hardly required discussion. Technology had given man the means to secure almost anything he wanted. Such was the unspoken assumption of those who attacked or ignored the Agrarians.

Man at last was coming to control nature. Here again Ransom had something to say. The exploitation of nature implicit in industrialization was disastrous to the good life. Mankind, of course, had to make use of nature. Indeed, had to prey upon nature. A return to Adam's happy life in the Garden of Eden (or that of the happy denizens of the Golden Age of the Greeks) was irrecoverable. Even so, man must indulge in no rape of nature; rather his relation to her should more nearly resemble a marriage involving respect and love. Ransom's own figure was that of a truce: no warfare against nature, no demand for unconditional surrender, rather a reasonable accommodation in which man could live in harmony with nature.

In one sense this was the most important item in the Agrarians' agenda, so deeply embedded in their thinking that they did not give it the prominence that it deserved. They did not, for example, use terms later to become familiar, such as “environmental protection” or “preservation of our natural heritage.” Yet had they done so in the 1930s, it would have done little good. Even today, the “dead” lakes of Canada and New England, impure water supplies, and noxious air have not yet brought much vigorous response from the national administration.

A few years later Ransom had ceased from any special agitation for what he and his friends had called Agrarianism. It was a pity that they had so named it, for the name played into the hands of their opponents who jeered at them for not practicing what they preached. Clearly none of them were trudging behind old Beck, the plow mule, down on the farm. (By such logic as this, of course, their opponents would have to be called Industrialists and would have been required to take their places in a factory production line, or more humbly, tuning automobile engines at the local garage.)

Yet, Agrarianism was for Ransom no idea picked up as a kind of fad. It was a proper extension of his thought processes—an application to daily life of his philosophy—his conception of a proper vocation for a large, perhaps the largest, segment of mankind. He gave up prosecution of the case because in spite of his concern for philosophy and what it had to tell us about the satisfactory life, Ransom had a powerful streak of pragmatism in his nature. One test of an idea, and an important one, was whether it could be put to work. By 1945 or perhaps earlier, he had decided that the people would not accept Agrarianism. It had no political future.

In the 1950s or 1960s, I remember that he told me with reference to Agrarianism that the younger men deserved their chance to bring about their own notions of what a society should be. He doubted that those new ideas would result in success and happiness, but they would be put in force nevertheless. This was said with no trace of cynicism, as if he hoped that he would live long enough to see their failure and utter his “I told you so.” Ransom was a generous man, and he had something of the calm of the old philosopher who is a bit detached from the fray.

I think, however, that Ransom for a time genuinely believed that the South might be willing to accept Agrarianism as a viable politico-economic program and that the Roosevelt administration might see fit to implement aspects of it. His early contributions to the cause had a quality of real enthusiasm.

How deeply the championship of Agrarianism was rooted in his thinking is abundantly displayed in a book that also appeared in 1930, his God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy. Here again the contest described is that between an abstracting rationalism and a loving comprehension of the concrete world as revealed by the senses and warmed by the emotions of the human being. Ransom makes it a contest between science on the one hand and art and religion on the other, but the science that he sees as rapacious and aggressive is not the contemplative science of, say, pure mathematics but the science that can be applied in working technologies. This “science” gives man power over nature and produces in man a dangerous hubris; art and religion on the other hand reflect the total experience of the human being, including an enjoyment of nature, and imply a sense of man's dependence on a powerful and mysterious entity that he must accept with awe but also may love and worship.

The book is full of challenging and often persuasive interpretations of such things as the story of Adam and Eve in the Happy Garden or the story of Cain and Abel or the Greek story of Prometheus, and it certainly gives a convincing account of the dilution of the Christian faith in the twentieth century.

As he had summarized it in a letter to Allen Tate some months before: “Little by little the God of the Jews has been whittled down into a spirit of science, or the spirit of love, or the spirit of Rotary; and now religion is not religion at all, but a purely secular experience. …”

What had caused the damage? In this same letter to Tate he writes: “The N[ew] T[estament] has been a backset as a religious myth; not its own fault, as I think but nevertheless a failure: it's hurt us.”

Ransom's logic is thus pushed inexorably: any lessening of the mysterious power of an inscrutable God is dangerous for mankind. The claim that man was also a God, however hedged about with reservations, will almost certainly encourage man to believe that mankind can aspire to godhead and that the Ruler of the Universe is after all knowable, not mysterious, and awesome, really a Big Friendly Brother, and probably just the spirit of brotherhood itself. For Ransom, such a view is a misconception, and a dangerous illusion for mankind to hold.

This view seems to leave Ransom with a primary audience of Orthodox Jews and just possibly Moslems. Though Ransom was later to say that his own position was that of a Unitarian, he must have known by 1930 that most American Unitarians were far too “liberal” in their theology to find any appeal at all in what he was saying.

Quite consciously, he was setting forth a program for the American South and for those whom he considered to be his own people. He makes this motive completely clear in his “Epilogue” to God Without Thunder. His logic, he concedes, would recommend that the Western world “Enter the Synagogue, if the Synagogue might be so kind as to receive it.” But the notion is impracticable, he believes, for “better or worse, man is a member of his own race or his own tribe. If there is not a religious institution that suits him quite near at home, he will have to go without one.” So in turn Ransom has to reject the Greek Orthodox Church, Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and finally comes down to Presbyterianism, Methodism, and the Baptists. These last denominations, he writes, are “evidently close to my kind of community,” even though he admits that they have tended “to secularize themselves more and more every day.”

It is an honest statement in which the speaker faces the hard facts, but it is also a counsel of despair—not only because Ransom is aware of the difficulty of restoring the Protestant denominations to his orthodoxy, but for a far more important reason: because the choice is ultimately made not in virtue of his creed's ultimate truth but because it appeals to the needs of the members of the society in question. In short, human considerations turn out here to be more important than the claim of truth. But the Protestant might answer: This is the very reason I am giving up what you call orthodoxy. What I believe is more congenial to me as a member of a secularized society than are the beliefs of an earlier day.

I simply do not know enough about the personal beliefs of Ransom in his later mature years. The signs that we have would indicate that he believed in a kind of poetic materialism, perhaps not unlike that of George Santayana. He loved nature, and he evidently found in art a way of bringing mankind into a loving enjoyment of it, but he did not make the mistake of turning nature into a kindly and softhearted nurse. In God Without Thunder, as we have seen, he comes close to identifying his god with nature itself, which is the source of both joy and sorrow but in which it is unpredictable. In 1929 in a letter to his friend Allen Tate, Ransom wrote: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; a big beginning, but only a beginning, of which is the love of the Lord. Substitute nature for the Lord and he won't feel aggrieved [italics mine].”

Landor's famous quatrain applies very well to Ransom himself if we omit the first line with its note of arrogance. Ransom rarely fought with anyone, though not because he felt that his antagonist was not a worthy opponent.

I fought with none for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved and next to nature, art.
I warmed both hands before the fire of life.
It sinks and I am ready to depart.

Ransom had enjoyed his life and his last days were serene ones. The third line also applies most specifically to Ransom. He was a man who loved games, everything from golf and tennis to bridge and poker, and he lived in a cheerful happiness that had in it nothing either gross or gloomy. He did love nature and art, but he was no Platonic philosopher king, planning myths and rituals for his less exalted countrymen. He really tried to practice what he preached, attempted to live what he thought was the proper life for others in the community. Though his God Without Thunder would seem to most people subversive of his father's faith, he dedicated the book to his father. His ties with his father remained close all his life. He attended Methodist services when his father preached. He even taught a Sunday School class, but it was noticed that when the Apostle's Creed was recited, Ransom did not join in the statement that he believed in “Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord. …” When Ransom was asked why, he said, “Because I do not believe it.” He gave up his churchgoing then, but the story is significant: he wanted to save his people and their culture and he would take part as fully as he could in their communal rites, but he had to be an honest man too. One has to acknowledge that at least he made a good try to fulfill his practical obligations as a member of his chosen community, though at the same time he had to honor the claims of intellectual truth as he saw it.

With Ransom's transfer to Kenyon College there was a waning of his interest in Agrarianism and in the religion that he thought was implied by it, a “traditional” religion of the sort described above. I think it wrong to say that Ransom ever “repudiated” Agrarianism, but he was no Don Quixote; he was too much the pragmatist for such a role as the Don's. Ransom still believed that he had been directing his lance against real giants that needed to be overthrown, but, though he was not mad, the bemused public at large could see in his endeavors only a tilting at some quite useful windmills. And since his society could not be talked out of this delusion, those giants were going to continue grinding away. After all, Ransom's efforts had always been in behalf of the society, not at all to show off his intellectual daring and dexterity. He quietly accepted the fact that the society had no intention of letting itself be changed radically. His churchgoing also stopped; a society that was committed to industrialism was happy enough to worship a God deprived of his thunder or to worship no God at all, since man believed that he was doing so well on his own newfound powers.

Though Ransom had for a long time been interested in the arts and particularly in poetry, he now came back to a consideration of the role of literature and the arts with a new emphasis. As the editor of a quarterly magazine, the newly established Kenyon Review, and with allies he could count on at The Southern Review, myself and Warren, there was an opportunity to present new claims for the importance of the arts. Ransom proposed that the two quarterlies should fire both barrels at once in an assertion of what was needed and thus salute the stirrings of critical thought. The Kenyon would publish five articles on this subject, and we at the Southern five others. Ransom himself in 1941 published a volume entitled The New Criticism.

Unintentionally, as he told me, he gave a name to that loosely defined entity that has come to be called the “new criticism.” Readers of the book that bears that title will have noted that Ransom expressed his disagreement with such other “new” critics as Yvor Winters, I. A. Richards, and T. S. Eliot. His purpose was not to give his endorsement to a new product. In fact, he closed his book with a chapter entitled “Wanted: An Ontological Critic.” Such a critic had obviously not yet appeared. What did Ransom mean by an ontological critic? It is not easy to say: but obviously the ontological critic had to be concerned with the special and essential character of poetry, not merely with the background or origins of a poem.

When Delmore Schwartz asked Ransom why he didn't attempt to remodel a critic like Blackmur or Brooks to fit the role, Ransom very properly refused to act on the suggestion. He had his own idea of what the proper critic should be, just as he had his own special conception of what poetry is. Nevertheless, he had many handsome things to say about some of his fellow critics, especially his younger friends, and no one could have been kinder to me or more concerned to help promote such a venture as Understanding Poetry, the little textbook that Robert Penn Warren and I published in 1938.

Yet the truth is that for all of Ransom's philosophical interest in the nature of poetry as a special kind of verbal discourse, his ultimate concern, I have always been convinced, has been the function of poetry within society. Like Plato he was finally interested in what good, if any, the poet did for the republic, or for the society as a whole. Even Aristotle, who made his definition of tragedy a matter of its possessing a special structure in its presentation of an action, nevertheless added in his concept of catharsis, which had to do with his interest in the effects of poetry on the citizen at large. Ransom had imbibed deeply from the classics when he had read “Greats” at Oxford.

The study of the arts and of poetry, Ransom felt, might help ameliorate the plight of the individual living in a secularized and increasingly industrialized society. It might renew for him some sense of a fullness of the life of the spirit, otherwise denied by his daily life. Literature might give him back at least something of the sort of thing that he sorely needed.

Sheer rationalism turned the world into an abstraction—a set of logical relationships that were enormously valuable for securing the means for living—but the whole man craved a full world, sensuous, concrete, stimulating to the emotions and engaging man's total being. As the world became more and more abstract, we more and more needed art, and great art that would render real life acceptable.

Narcotics, violent stimulants, exciting distractions, such as those given by cheap and superficial art, could provide only temporary escapes from the boredom, the monotony, and the hardships of so much modern life.

This sense of what genuine art could do for society thus deeply influenced Ransom's theory of art. For example, a poem represented a statement of a sort and thus possessed a logic that involved a rational process. But a genuine poem went on to introduce all sorts of items not directly relevant to the “logic” of the poem. They delayed the movement toward the object—they gave glimpses of the real world that we know in its fullness. They turned something as abstract as a road map into something more like an oil painting of a landscape.

Such is my own analogy. Ransom, however, has supplied one of his own. The structure of a poem, which organizes it and represents its logic, corresponds to the path that would lead from where I am to my elected destination. But as I walk along the path, I am induced to stray from it from time to time, to look at a spray of wildflowers that caught my eye, or a small waterfall that has come into view just outside the path, or any other interesting though “irrelevant” item along the way. My walk with its practical concern has become thus a richer and more humanly rewarding experience.

A poem for Ransom, then, has a structure (the logical element) and a texture (sensuous, concrete materials that are irrelevant to that structure). Thus, there is a dualism that Ransom argues must be finally overcome if the poem is not to be reduced to nonsense. Yet the irrelevant material has an importance: it reminds us of a world much richer and more comprehensive than the abstractions to which we so often reduce our experience in order to accomplish a particular task or goal. No wonder Ransom chose as a title for his finest and most eloquent collection of critical essays The World's Body. His thesis there is that we must not let that marvelous and wonderful entity be reduced to a diagram. If we are deluded into thinking that by such reductive analysis we can possess it and use it as we please, we shall end up by destroying our own humanity.

Ransom brings religion and poetry very close together. Indeed, they become almost identical. Ransom's position seems to me essentially that of Matthew Arnold—granted the vast differences in their approach to the problem and the differences in the tone of their writings. (Yet the index to Daniel Young's life of Ransom has not a single reference to Arnold. Perhaps I do overestimate that likeness.)

For me, and I believe for others, the difficulty with Ransom's account of poetry lies in its basic dualism. The distinction between structure and texture seems very like the age-old split between content and form, a split which implies that metaphor, diction, rhythm, stanza form, and such other devices have only a “decorative” function, whereas clearly they can affect powerfully any ideational content, changing “what the poem really says.” Indeed, as I. A. Richards reminded us some sixty years ago, if you change the way something is said, you have changed to some degree what it says. To take an extreme case: “That was a fine thing to do” can change its meaning from high commendation to withering disapproval, depending upon the tone of voice in which it is uttered. Good poets have the means to control the tone even when they are not present to read the poem in their own voices. Furthermore, if the concrete particulars ought to be irrelevant to the logic of the poem as a whole, are they more effective in proportion to their irrelevancy? What is the optimum irrelevance? The examination of any actual poem will show that there are vast differences between the degrees of irrelevance of the concrete items (the texture) to the thrust (logical structure) of the poem. Thus, Donne's celebrated comparison of the souls of a pair of lovers to the legs of a geometer's compass gets a high mark in the irrelevance scale, but most readers (and not merely modern readers) have found it a very effective way of bringing the poem to a satisfying close. But one can find many figures in Abraham Cowley's poetry that are on an absolute scale no more irrelevant than Donne's comparison and yet are felt to be absurd and ridiculous. I shall cite here one of Cowley's less absurd comparisons. The following stanza is from his Hymn to Light.

First-born of Chaos, who so fair didst come
From the old Negro's darksome womb!
Which, when it saw the lovely child,
The melancholy mask put on kind looks and smiled …

Or to come at matters from the other direction: why is Wordsworth's comparison of a young girl to the beauty of a star “When only one / Is shining in the sky” so much more effective than that well-worn comparison “Her eyes were like stars”? Stars are stars, and it is hard to see why one star is more completely relevant (or irrelevant) that two stars. I can't think that the matter is so simple that it turns upon the fact that a whole girl is less like a star and therefore more irrelevant than that the girl's two eyes are more like a pair of stars and therefore more nearly relevant. Wordsworth's comparison actually draws on the whole context of the poem and helps make the point of the poem: the girl in question, though unknown to the world at large and one who would be as little noticed by a passerby as “a violet by a mossy stone,” is for the man who speaks the poem the only star in his firmament, not like Milton's beauty the “Cynosure” of all eyes, but surely for this speaker, his only true North Star, or better still—since the planet of love, Venus, is the first star in the sky in the evening, and for a while the only star that shines there—the star of love.

In short, the simile that Wordsworth uses is an important element in what the voice in the poem is saying: it helps define precisely what is being said and is actually highly relevant to the poem. It is not a truly irrelevant element.

What seems to me most worth saying in this general connection is that the structure-texture thesis will not account for Ransom's own poetry. He is indeed a very fine poet. The note that runs all through his poetry is a defense of a concrete and mysterious world in which all of us have been born and not an abstract and limited world that man can put to his own use. But there are many variations on the theme and many quiet lyrics that are only peripheral to this theme of cultural crisis: a child confronted for the first time with the fact of death; the deep love for one's native land, not lessened or deepened because of the unmistakable signs of its decline; a circumstance in which physical pain and mental anguish are weighed one against the other and the one used to buffer the other; the charming but, nevertheless, foolish confidence of youth. Many of these are “simple” poems, the matter of every day; but seen as cameo presentations of the universal human predicament, they take on power. No wonder that Thomas Hardy was one of Ransom's favorite poets; and Ransom's poems are just as intensely out of the “upper South” as are Hardy's poems out of his Wessex.

Yet the details of these poems of Ransom's are so completely relevant to the import of the poems that without them the poems would be so abstract as to be almost meaningless. Consider one of Ransom's best-known lyrics, “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter.” Little girls die unexpectedly every day, and because they seem so full of life their sudden death will seem especially desolating: but in this poem sudden death seems particularly desolating, for in this poem a generalization, an actuarial statistic, suddenly becomes alive and catches our attention and engages our feelings intensely. Yet the emotion evoked is not irresponsible; it is quietly measured to the occasion.

How is it done? Well, no one can fully explain the magic of a truly fine poem, but one can hope to call attention to some obviously salient points. There is the presence of the geese in the poem. The poem has only twenty lines all told, but nine of them have to do with the child's chasing the geese from the shade of the apple trees to the pond. The geese are “lazy,” “sleepy, and proud.” They cry out in their own “goose” language, of course, “Alas,” but under the rod of the “little Lady,” they “scuttle” away to the pond.

As the geese are described here in the poem they are creatures out of a child's fairy-tale world, sufficiently like human beings to take on the qualities of old, rather stuffy human beings, but they are recognizably geese, in their language and in the way they clumsily move about.

Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud

and later as I have already remarked, they

                                                                                          scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies.

I don't know what “tricking” would mean here. The poet has exercised his liberty as a poet: for the Oxford English Dictionary knows it not in any sense that would fit a particular kind of perambulation. Maybe Ransom means that the geese keep deceiving the viewer's expectation, seeming to start one way, then stopping, and going another. Anyway, most of us, if we follow the child's perceptions as she “harries” the confused geese, do accept the word.

Are all the details about the geese irrelevant to the poem? I don't think so. This passage brings to life the earlier statement in the poem about the “speed in her little body,” and the “lightness in her footfall.” It helps explain why (in the first stanza) we are told that

It is no wonder her brown study
                    Astonishes us all.

Moreover, the episode in which we watch her “tireless heart” in its play also unobtrusively makes another point: she has now, indeed, moved from a world of play and fancy into the studious concentration of the typical philosopher—little girls do not characteristically fall into “brown studies.” The little girl is also moved out of childhood's world of talking beasts and into a world of stern reality. In the last stanza, the poet comments once again on her “brown study,” as she lies there “so primly propped.”

Wordsworth in one of his best-known poems addresses the child as “Thou, best philosopher,” and we know from the context in what sense he meant it. Ransom's poem barely hints at the association. Even so, the child in her “brown study” has something to tell us about our destiny as human beings or at least is able to make a point that we already know all too well: Death is no respecter of persons. Death makes no promises as to how long we are allowed to live.

Though I don't want to worry the point of relevance or irrelevancy, I do hope that I have shown why I hesitate to accept Ransom's structure-texture account. In this poem, as so often, what Ransom has dubbed “irrelevant” seems to be doing all the really important work in the poem. We may summarize the meaning of the poem in a prose paraphrase, and such a paraphrase may have its uses in any shorthand description of a poem, but no paraphrase, however carefully made, can be a substitute for what the poem essentially is. I would prefer to say that the real poem is not so much a “logical structure” as a “dramatic rendition” of a total experience. That such experiences are organized for us by a good poet, novelist, or dramatist, I would cheerfully accept. They do not give us simply a jumble of detail, even though a poem like The Waste Land seemed such to some of its earliest readers. But how useful is it to describe the organization of a poem as logical when its essential unity seems to be the coherence of a dramatic experience or that of a well-told tale? For the poem (or novel or drama) cannot be reduced to a logical statement or statements without the loss of its very substance. In fact, Ransom in his Selected Poems (1963) writes: “Poetry is still the supremely inclusive speech which escapes, as if unaware of them, the strictures and reductions of the systematic logical understanding.” This seems to be a much more accurate statement of the case, and I would like to think that it was Ransom's final revision of his structure-texture account.

Yet any difficulties with his account of the makeup of a poem that I have had in the past do not compromise my experience of the poems he writes. Let the master call his metaphor, his daring uses of diction, his subacid ironies, and his general handling of tone—let him reckon them all as irrelevancies if he likes to think of them so. I find that they actually render his poems brilliant evocations of a mood or make a striking observation or more often constitute a rich and persuasive commentary on human life. Moreover, when they do become something like a pronouncement, the material that determines the voice of the speaker converts it from what might be the glibness of the daily columnist or the harangue of the backwoods prophet or the complaints of the newspaper contributor to a measured utterance of dignity, maturity, and wisdom. Control of tone through various rhetorical devices provides the credentials that imply that the speaker possesses experience, some knowledge of the world in which we live, a proper sense of humor, and no inflated sense of his own worth.

One hears that voice over and over in Ransom's poems. Often it is tinged with irony, sometimes with a rueful self-knowledge, but rarely, if ever, with an arrogant confidence in the rightness of what he says. The range of subjects and occasions is large. The incident may be a trivial lover's quarrel between two adolescents, but not trivial for them (“Parting, Without a Sequel”). It can be a wounding and bitter outbreak between a married pair (“Two in August”). I have been told that the pair involved in this poem are two cats, male and female; and the poem is, detail by detail, entirely susceptible of that interpretation. Yet knowing this leaves the poem nevertheless a highly interesting and even poignant commentary on troubled human relationships.

In “Blue Girls” the speaker watches girls “twirling their blue skirts” on the grounds of a girls' college or finishing school. They are absorbed with their looks, their growing up into womanhood, and bored with their classroom exercises. The poem has been described as a bitter commentary, but it is nothing of the kind. The young women are not wicked, but young and thoroughly human and, of course, occupied with matters close to their own affairs; and their beauty is fragile. The observer is not censorious but feels the poignance of their pride and hopefulness. He is not being sarcastic, therefore, when he says (but, of course, not audibly to them)

Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish
It is so frail.

The poem ends with a continuation of what he could tell these delightful young creatures. He could tell them something of one of their teachers, known to them as a

                                        lady with a terrible tongue,
Blue eyes fallen from blue. …

who was once

lovelier than any of you.

Ransom is a realistic poet, an ironic poet. But far from being immune to beauty or the attractiveness of the world of the senses, he is able to capture the power and attraction of the world often almost magically. He does so in retelling the story of Judith of Bethulia, who when her city was besieged by the Assyrian king, Holofernes, volunteered to make her way outside the city to his tent, to get him drunk and kill him. She does so and brings back the conqueror's head to prove that she has finished him off. The next day the Jews attack their now-demoralized enemies and destroy them utterly.

A Hebrew elder is imagined to be speaking the poem. He says:

Beautiful as the flying legend of some leopard,
She had not yet chosen her great captain or prince. …
And a wandering beauty is a blade out of its scabbard. …
Nor by process of veiling she grew the less fabulous.
Grey or blue veils, we were desperate to study
The invincible emanations of her white body. …

The poem ends with Holofernes dead but the Hebrew elders still have their worries.

May God send unto our virtuous lady her prince.
It is stated she went reluctant to that orgy,
Yet a madness fevers our young men, and not the clergy
Nor the elders have turned them unto modesty since.
Inflamed by the thought of her naked beauty, with desire?
Yes, and chilled with fear and despair.

Ransom can produce a withering satire, though he ordinarily uses the more gentle modes of irony. In “Three Mountebanks,” however, he takes as his targets three Southern hot-gospellers. As the son of a Methodist parson, Ransom doubtless knew what his father thought of that breed. I know what my father thought of them. Yet even here, there is no realistic surface. He distances them somewhat. The first of these Mountebanks vaunts the merits of Fides, his hound of faith; the second, those of Humphrey, his elephant of patience; and the third, of Agnes, his lamb who demands everywhere to be sacrificed. The evangelical rhetoric is brilliantly caricatured.

A few of Ransom's poems deal rather directly with the crisis in culture, the confusion entailed by the loss of the old faith and its verities. “Man Without Sense of Direction” and “Persistent Explorer” are two such poems. The former describes a man “Who cannot fathom nor perform his nature.”

And he writhes like an antique man of bronze
That is beaten by furies visible,
Yet he is punished not knowing his sins. …

His problem is essentially that of J. Alfred Prufrock or one of Eliot's Hollow Men and springs from the same source, but the poem is not in the least like Eliot's, and I am not sure that Ransom was aware of any likeness.

Ransom's “Persistent Explorer” puts the cause of the Explorer's problems rather boldly. In his explorations he has come upon a mighty cataract. The ancient Greeks would have recognized it as a sacred spot. For such a Homeric Greek a goddess would have provided a theophany as she did to a mountain shepherd of that time. But no supernatural vision occurs to the modern explorer. As Ransom puts it

The cloud was, but the goddess was not there.

For him

It was water, only water, tons of it
Dropping into the gorge, and every bit
Was water—the insipid chemical H2O. …
                    Furious the spectacle
But it spelled nothing, there was not any spell
Bidding him whether cower or rejoice.

Science as such is dispassionately neutral. One can build neither ethics nor aesthetics on it and certainly not a religion.

Yet the joke—if it is on anyone—is on the Explorer himself. And so

          no unreasonable outcry
The pilgrim made; only a rueful grin
Spread over his lips until he drew them in;
He did not sit upon a rock and die.

He refuses to give himself up to romantic despair. He will keep up his exploration. He will seek to find a country of the mind in which the human being can discover a more satisfactory habitation. Such was indeed the course that Ransom took during the rest of his life, but primarily in his discussions of literature as a special kind of activity that enjoyed a privileged status in relation to mankind's other activities and that served a very important function in the total human economy.

Prose, written in a characteristically graceful and persuasive style, was the principal medium for these lucubrations and speculations. Ransom's days as a poet were pretty well over with the publication of the collection entitled Two Gentlemen in Bonds early in 1927. He wrote very few poems afterward.

After 1934, Ransom wrote only one more poem, “Address to the Scholars of New England,” in 1939. But he continued to revise his poems, and in his last collection in 1974 he rewrites eight of them, printing the new version side-by-side with the original poem and adding comments in which he explains the reasons for the revisions he makes. That he should have done so is a very interesting phenomenon, particularly since most of Ransom's friends—I think I'm correct in saying this—preferred the earlier versions. I think that the older philosopher tended to take over from the brilliant younger poet and that the logic of the argument officially dismissed what the muse had originally offered through inspiration. The reader, of course, will have to decide for himself. In any case, no harm has been done. If the revisions improve the poems, so be it; if not, the originals exist, and for those, like me, who usually prefer the original versions, a comparison with the altered version at least serves to call attention to certain felicities of word or metaphor or rhythmical device which contributed to the magical effect that we treasure.

We have had no other poet quite like Ransom in English, and we are not likely to have one in the future. He was an original, and he came from a special culture that may well be disappearing. He was thoroughly Southern, though he does not fit any accepted Southern stereotype. In his manner, however, he did, and Time magazine, for example, always referred to him as “courtly.” The courtliness owed nothing to a landed aristocracy. The truth is that courteous manners were widely disseminated in the South and were the everyday habits of people of modest means. Ransom's middle Tennessee had never had a plantation economy. It was a “furnishing” state for the lower South, growing wheat, tobacco, and corn and breeding horses, mules, and cattle for export to the lower South, which was heavily committed to cotton culture.

Ransom, himself, was also basically evangelical in religious matters but firmly committed to learning. The Methodists set up colleges everywhere: Vanderbilt, Duke, and Emory, for example, all began as Methodist foundations. The classics were still regarded as essential to a sound education, and in Ransom's day Tennessee was dotted with small classical academies where Latin and often Greek were taught as a matter of course. When Ransom went to Oxford, he had already had a provincial version of what the Oxford students had had at the great English “public” schools like Eton and Winchester.

It has been said that Ransom's speech had been slightly Anglicized. This is nonsense. He did use the British pronunciation of a few special words, such as “decadent.” But his dropping of the final consonant “r” or his suppression of it in words like arm, forth, and sort, he took to England with him. They are or were until lately a regular feature of the Southern lowland dialect. Ransom and I had got them with our mother's milk.

Yet Oxford did have a great influence on Ransom, and though he never aped English forms and manners, his mind was in great part formed by his Oxford education, and he came to admire English civilization—not that of London but of Thomas Hardy's Wessex, where man and nature had come to an agreeable accommodation with each other and the life and the rituals of the people of the west country showed as much. I had heard Ransom talk about the matter in one of his classes and was much impressed by what he had to say.

Ransom also had inherited from his family and his regional culture a solid moral base. Though he was careful not to don the robes of the moralist, he had very firm notions of what was good and what was evil and was, on certain matters, almost squeamish—or at least so it would have seemed to the present-day world. Such was the case in spite of his complete emancipation from orthodox Christianity. He looked with gentleness and kindliness on the positions taken by such friends of his as Allen Tate and myself and was the close and intimate friend at Kenyon of Charles Coffin, a committed Anglican. But for him Christianity was at best simply a great myth that had been useful to mankind in the past but was of very limited utility today.

How may one sum up this highly talented and brilliantly accomplished man, on one level so apparently simple and straightforward and yet at the same time so complicated in his learning and in his theoretical interests? Another contradiction: on one level he impressed one as the pure thinker, detached and remote, in argument referring this matter to what Plato had said in “the Sophist” and to, on another point, what Kant had settled forever in his “Critique of Practical Judgement.” Yet, on another level, Ransom clearly wanted to see his ideas put into action: his schemes for a proper economic basis for a good society in the South; his notions of what could be done with the Christian church in our present society; his eagerness to get “Criticism, Inc.” at work in our universities so that the great virtues of literature could be made available to society—all of these were matters in which Ransom was deeply concerned. He was certainly no idle dreamer; he was not even the detached seer whose job was to solve problems and leave the application of them, and even the dissemination of them, to others to work out.

I have never come to a real understanding of his character and personality, and I now do not expect to do so. But I can offer my tribute to an extraordinary man who did so much for me, and for other people like me, through his example as a genuine man of letters and through his direct encouragement. I was only one of many who owe him a great debt. Not the least of his gifts to me was to jolt me out of my jejune romanticism and to open my eyes to the world of reality.