[In the following excerpt, Young provides an overview of Ransom's early verse, contending that few poets of Ransom's generation “have been able to represent with greater accuracy and precision the inexhaustible ambiguities, the paradoxes and tensions, the dichotomies and ironies that make up modern life.”]

In the summer of 1920 a group of young men—Vanderbilt University faculty members and students plus a few townspeople—began meeting at the home of James M. Frank on Whitland Avenue in Nashville, Tennessee, about two miles from the university, so that each member of the group could read his poems and have them criticized by the other members. These young men, including John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson (later Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren would join the group), knew each other because they had belonged to an informal circle of townspeople and university affiliates who met from 1914 to the outbreak of World War I, first at informal social gatherings and later at discussion sessions covering a wide range of topics—literature, art, religion, and philosophy. These prewar meetings were presided over by Sidney Mttron Hirsch, a Jewish mystic, etymologist, and world traveler, but in the days immediately following the war the mantle of leadership passed to Ransom, who had just published his first book of poetry. The character of the meetings soon changed, for Ransom was interested in the craft of poetry.

The nature of the meetings was again altered after Allen Tate joined the group in November, 1921. Tate possessed “a knowledge of literary matters,” Ransom remarked in “In amicitia,” an essay published in the Sewanee Review (Autumn, 1959) to honor Tate on his sixtieth birthday, “which were not the property of our own region at that time.” What Tate brought to the group was literary modernism.

In April, 1922, the group published the first issue of a little magazine entitled the Fugitive. Between then and December, 1925, nineteen issues of the now internationally known journal of poetry and brief critical commentary were published.

Born in Pulaski, Tennessee, on April 30, 1888, John Crowe Ransom grew up in the small middle Tennessee towns in which his father served as Methodist minister. He attended Bowen Academy in Nashville, from which he was graduated in 1903. The following fall he entered Vanderbilt and graduated first in the class of 1909, after dropping out for two years following his sophomore year to teach in secondary schools. In 1910 he entered Christ Church College of Oxford University, from which three years later he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Litterae Humaniores. He taught for one year in the Hotchkiss School before joining the faculty of the department of English of Vanderbilt University. He remained in that position until August, 1937, when he accepted a post at Kenyon College of Gambier, Ohio. Two years later he founded Kenyon Review, one of the most distinguished literary quarterlies ever published in America. He edited the Review for twenty years, retired and lived the remainder of his life, except for occasional visiting professorships, in Gambier. He died on July 3, 1974.

Ransom's first poem was published in the Independent for February 22, 1919. It expresses the irritation a young man feels because a young lady, with whom he is watching the sunset, seems little moved by the beauties of the natural surroundings. As Ransom would express the attitude later, she was not aware of “the world's body.” Encouraged, no doubt, by the fact that his poems were being accepted by that journal and the Philadelphia Public Ledger, for which his Oxford friend Christopher Morley was a columnist, Ransom continued to write verse. Much of it, he commented later, “made considerable use of the word God … that ultimate mystery to which all our great experiences reduce.” By the time he and Davidson, who were both in officer training school, met at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, in late summer of 1917, he had a “whole sheaf of poems,” a copy of which he gave Davidson, who pondered over them while he was serving in France. These were the poems published as Poems About God (1919) while Ransom was still serving as an artillery officer in Europe.

They were not the kind of poems one would expect from the dutiful son of a Methodist minister, for they clearly reveal Ransom's skepticism, the schism that had developed in his thinking between orthodox religion and secular philosophy. The reader is constantly aware that the poet is troubled by the way God makes himself manifest in the world. God hears the pious old lady's prayer, but his only response is a frown. The God the poet presents in “Geometry” seems to be a crazy man. The man in “Worship” finds God in a crockery stein at the local pub. “God's oldest joke,” the poet writes, is the “fact that in the finest flesh / There isn't any soul.” “For all his mercies,” the poet concludes, “God be thanked / But for his tyrannies be blamed.”

The reader of Ransom's mature poetry would probably doubt that these early efforts were written by the same man who wrote “The Equilibrists” and “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter.” The irony is too obvious, direct and heavy-handed. These poems reflect, as Thornton Parsons has noted, “a simple amateurism, a complete freedom from aesthetic self-consciousness” (John Crowe Ransom [New York, 1969], 17). This less-than-perfect verse does have some characteristics, however, of the later poetry. These early efforts are fables, anecdotes, or simple little narratives concerned with mutability, death, and the passing of youthful energy and beauty, or with man's dual nature. Many characters in these early poems, as in the later ones, come to grief because they cannot accept the nature of the world in which they live.

Dick's a sturdy little lad,
Yonder throwing stones;
Agues and rheumatic pains
Will fiddle on his bones.

Perhaps the basic difference between these poems and the later ones is that the identity of the persona who appears in them is transparent. The speaker is obviously Ransom himself. He is voicing some queries that have shaken the faith of an orthodox middle Tennessee lad who has gone to Oxford for three years. Never again would Ransom write poems with such an apparent autobiographical bias.

Before the Fugitive was begun, Tate recalls in Memoirs and Opinions (1975), Ransom “had written a poem which foreshadowed the style for which he has become famous; it was ‘Necrological,’ still one of his better poems; I marvelled at it because it seemed to me that overnight he had left behind him the style of his first book and, without confusion, had mastered a new style.” The poem, which appeared in the Fugitive for June, 1922, was suggested by Ransom's reading of the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who after being slain in battle was left to be eaten by the wolves. Ransom imagines a young friar coming into the field soon after the battle, attempting to devise some means of justifying the suffering and human slaughter that have occurred there. He thinks of its obvious inconsequence for those who won today but go to be slain elsewhere. By what means can one justify human love and sacrifice, devotion to a cause however sacred, if the winner of today's engagement goes to find death in tomorrow's? He ponders these and related questions until his faith is seriously challenged. He learns as he looks at the body of the lady, who has sacrificed both her reputation and her life for her lover, that the body is more than a mere enclosure for the soul, that there is a kind of love far different from the adoration he feels for his Lord. It would seem that Ransom believes an important lesson can be learned here—the monistic system of the friar and his church will not explain the many paradoxes of the world around him. As he stands in “a deep surmise,” his head bowed “as under a riddle”; he is “So still that he likened himself unto those dead / Whom the kites of Heaven solicited with sweet cries.” The experience has rendered him impotent, unable to act or reason.

Most of the poetry by which Ransom will be remembered was written between April, 1922, and December, 1925, the years in which the Fugitive was published, and most of it first appeared in that journal. The combined characteristics of that poetry, which Tate described as in the “mature manner,” are most distinctive: the subtle irony, the nuanced ambiguities, the metaphysical conceits, the wit, the cool detached tone. Most of the poetry was collected in Chills and Fever (1925) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Ransom also published three selections of his poems, all of which contain new and revised verses but few new poems: Selected Poems (1945) includes only five poems written after 1925; Selected Poems (1963), Selected Poems, Revised and Enlarged (1969) includes twelve sonnets from Two Gentlemen in Bonds and markedly revised versions of several earlier poems. Finally, however, Ransom chose to preserve only 80 of the 153 poems he published.

Ransom's conviction that aimless, purposeless modern man cannot know the redemptive qualities of human love is best expressed in “Spectral Lovers” (1923) and “The Equilibrists” (1925), the latter considered by many Ransom's best poem. In the first poem the man and woman know they are in love so why, they wonder, are “they frozen apart in fear?” They remain spectral lovers because of their own weaknesses and because they cannot bring themselves to the point of decision. They will remain spectral lovers, potential lovers; they can never consummate their love, but they will never be without the desire to love. “The Equilibrists,” a more suggestive and evocative poem, explores a similar situation. The lovers are in “a torture of equilibrium” because they burn “with fierce love always to come near,” but honor keeps them apart. The lovers yearn for an ideal world in which the conflicting forces of honor and desire can be reunited, but this is not such a world. The one to come also offers little hope to them. The state of painful equilibrium in which they find themselves will be continued throughout eternity. Knowing their plight, one in which their “flames were not more radiant than their ice,” the poet can only offer an epitaph, “lines to memorize their doom.”

Equilibrists lie here; stranger, tread light;
Close, but untouching in each other's sight;
Mouldered the lips and ashy the tall skull.
Let them lie perilous and beautiful.

“Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter” (1924), Ransom's best-known poem, is also one of his best, one that Randall Jarrell has called “perfectly realized … and almost perfect.” Like many of Ransom's other poems, this one is on the precariousness of human life, the fleetingness of feminine beauty. It demonstrates a quality of Ransom's artistry that Graham Hough has noted: the poet's ability to present important problems through delicate subject matter. Since it concerns the death of a little girl, the poem could easily deteriorate into trite and shabby pathos, but Ransom handles his material admirably. He achieves aesthetic distance by presenting the essentials of the poem from the “high-window” of an interested but uninvolved bystander. Then, as Robert Penn Warren has pointed out, the burden of the poem lies in the poet's development of his attitude to the girl's death. First he is astonished because the news is so unexpected (“There was such speed in her little body, / And such lightness in her footfall”); after a moment's reflection, however, the astonishment turns to vexation. The speaker has confronted another of the inexplicable mysteries of the world he must live in. There is no piteous cry to heaven for justification or solace; the poet uses a usually lamentable occasion for some of his most effective irony, achieved by contrasting the stock response to death to the one addressed in the poem.

In his use of wit and irony, in the tension of paradox and ambiguity of his best verse, Ransom is distinctively a modern poet. His basic attitudes, however, as well as the poetic forms he employs, reflect his continuing interest in tradition. In “Old Mansion” (1924), Ransom suggests that only through participation in the culture out of which one comes can he develop a sensitive awareness of the past and create a feeling of stability and permanence in the flux of an ever-changing world. One can tolerate the harsh unpleasantness of the present world if he will glance backward to the felicities of a previous age. Ransom expresses the same attitude in “Antique Harvesters,” which he calls his Southern poem. Here the persona calls upon the young men to get to know their famous lady, to realize the myth that in its full bronze maturity retains all the vigor and vitality of its green youth. They must experience it now for soon it will pass into the grayness of death and oblivion.

Any final estimate of Ransom's literary achievement must take into account his poetry. In a small handful of poems his achievement is remarkable. He has provided, as Isabel Gamble MacCaffrey has pointed out, an “accurate mirror of the modern sensibility.” Few poets of his generation have been able to represent with greater accuracy and precision the inexhaustible ambiguities, the paradoxes and tensions, the dichotomies and ironies that make up modern life.