After reading the giants like Yeats and Frost, and the lesser but still great talents of Robinson and Auden, the lover of modern formal poetry can do no better than to encounter the dozen or so perfect lyrics of John Crowe Ransom. The complete selection of his poems numbers merely seventy-two, and yet it is difficult to imagine a modern writer whose poetry and criticism comprise a more highly finished and distinguished body of work. If his name seems only vaguely familiar, this is because we live in that phase of Ransom's reputation when most of his students are deceased, when many of his social ideas have either been adopted or so distorted that they can be dismissed, and when most of the literary critics formed by his genius are now attacked by another “new” generation eager for renown.

Yet Ransom led both the Fugitive group at Vanderbilt University in the twenties and the Southern Agrarians in the late twenties and thirties. If the Fugitives and their journal were a response to the sentimental “moonlight and magnolia” school of Southern culture, they were also a healthy and traditional counterweight to the influence of Pound and Eliot's espousal of both modernism and free verse. In a much wider social and political context, Ransom and the Southern Agrarians, especially in their famous manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, undertook a vigorous multi-front war. They stood up against one of those periodic waves of anti-Southernism that was then using the Scopes's “Monkey Trial” as both focus and excuse. Moreover, they fought against the industrialism, materialism, and decadence of the “Roaring Twenties,” and against the experiments in socialism that were launched in the desperate years after the Depression of 1929.

Unlike many of the writers in his generation who were demanding a “political” art, Ransom never made the mistake of using his poetry as a stalking horse for his great social passion, or what he simply called his “patriotism.” Indeed, his own poems and literary criticism suggest that true poetry can exist only when the poet puts aside his burden of ideologies and self-consciousness. His hope for poetry was that it could become so much the mirror to nature that the things of the world, not the author, might somehow be fully present in the poem, as in his description of the little girl and her geese in “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter”:

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,
For the tireless heart within the little
Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!

Ransom's attitude, even when ironic, is one of humility and respect for the objects of the world, as he writes in his essay “Poetry: A Note in Ontology”:

The way to obtain the true Dinglichkeit [thing-likeness] of a formal dinner or a landscape or a beloved person is to approach the object as such, and in humility; then it unfolds a nature which we are unprepared for if we have put our trust in the simple idea which attempted to represent it.

He was always against the rigid application of over-simple theories, whether those of science, social science, or art-theory. When he saw Americans reducing the complexities of human life to statistical solutions and government programs, he fought the trend with intellectual clarity and gentlemanly irony. He perceived quite clearly that it is the intellectual who is most prone to “a temptation to his conceit to which proud modern man has proved unequal.” Men of ideas, as much as men of business, act as if “God is supposed to have had the goodness to invite man to profiteer upon the universe.” The idea of reducing the natural or the supernatural until it is merely useful is anathema to Ransom. He equates it with Spiritual Rotarianism, humanism, the pretense that man is God.

From his own point of view, Ransom most approves of the God of the Old Testament, whose will is unfathomable, and whose every act is potentially dangerous to man. In God Without Thunder, his book on the spiritual flaccidity of modern religion, he offers these maxims:

With whatever religious institution a modern man may be connected, let him try to turn it back towards orthodoxy.

Let him insist on a virile and concrete God, and accept no Principle as a substitution.

Despising the way that mainline churches reduce the majesty of religion to a conception “mostly of the principle of social benevolence and of physical welfare,” Ransom loved the God who allows Job to be thoroughly plagued. When pressed by Job for an explanation of his suffering, He merely tells His creature that when man can create the universe, then he may ask why.

In his poem “Judith of Bethulia,” Ransom reveals just how dangerous and difficult it is to judge the nature of action that pleases the deity. Judith is called upon to exercise her great beauty, “Beautiful as the flying legend of some leopard,” to appease Holofernes who would sack and destroy the city of Bethulia. Judith goes to his tent and when he is drunk and sleeping, she cuts off his head, effectively ending the siege:

The heathen have all perished. The victory was furnished.
We smote them hiding in vineyards, barns, annexes,
And now their white bones clutter the holes of foxes,
And the chieftain's head, with grinning sockets, and varnished—
Is it hung on the sky with a hideous epitaphy?
No, the woman keeps the trophy.
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 nakedness with desire?
Yes, and chilled with fear and despair.

In these lines Ransom holds in abeyance passion, prurience, and moral judgement with a pure control of diction and meter. Given his traditionalism, it is not surprising that on many occasions Ransom went to great pains to define the function of meter as he saw it. In his essay “Forms and Citizens,” published as part of The World's Body, Ransom writes:

Given an object, and a poet burning to utter himself upon it, he must take into account a third item, the form into which he must cast his utterance. (If we like, we may call it the body which he must give to his passion.) It delays and hinders him. In the process of “composition” the burning passion is submitted to cool and scarcely relevant considerations.

That delay, that hindering, is a moral discipline which prevents the poet from too easily projecting his own neuroses and enthusiasms onto the world of his art. Ransom had little sympathy for the argument that the modern poet's genius is so explosive and unique that it cannot be fettered by the strictures that Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton found liberating. He replies in “Forms and Citizens” that, “If the passion burns too hot in the poet to endure the damping of the form, he might be advised that poetry can exercise no undue compulsion upon his spirit since, after all, there is prose.”

Ransom was the master of the understated passion, of restraint and honor holding the barbaric yawp at bay. In “Dead Boy” he makes the elegy for an all-too-ordinary boy as simple and stately as this:

The elder men have strode by the box of death
To the wide flag porch, and muttering low send round
The bruit of the day. O friendly waste of breath!
Their hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound.
He was pale and little, the foolish neighbors say;
The first-fruits, saith the Preacher, the Lord hath taken;
But this was the old tree's late branch wrenched away,
Grieving the sapless limbs, the shorn and shaken.

Ransom understood the pique that might arise when a writer finds he cannot handle his form well enough to say precisely what he first intended, and he was quick to acknowledge that prose, or some rough equivalent of it, can go rather more directly to the precise statement of a problem. This advantage, once granted, did not contradict his sense that, “it would at least seem likely that the determinate mathematical regularities of meter which are imposed upon the words have as much to do with the total effect of the poem as, in a sister art, the determinate geometrical regularities of outline which are imposed upon the stones have to do with the total effect of a work of architecture.” Like the outline of the stones, the meter provides clarity of line, strength, endurance, and beauty.

Ransom made it his task to define the unique quality by which meter, for all its regularity, creates poetry. His letter to Allen Tate, of April 15, 1924, shows both how civil was his attitude and how relentless his judgement:

The poet hates his bondage—the patterns; but he knows it is the condition of his art; and so he takes just as much liberty as he can: if experimentally minded, he goes pretty far, testing (1) whether he will conform sufficiently to remain in his art, or failing that, (2) whether he may not be a Sandburg, and have stuff good enough to stand in any shape, art or no art.

Ransom had no desire to ignore the good “stuff” of Carl Sandburg, but neither was he willing to misapply the name of poetry, just because we have no more precise word for what Sandburg wrote. He was not inclined to accept the modernist notion of calling everything poetry which does not touch the right-hand margin of the page on a regular basis.

In his important essay “Wanted: An Ontological Critic,” Ransom provides a classic explanation of the effect of meter on composition. Briefly stated, a determinate meaning which the poet has in mind is filtered through a formal sound pattern, e.g. iambic pentameter. The sound pattern will necessarily distort in some way the choice of words used to carry the prose meaning. In turn the meaning will distort the sound pattern, either because natural verbal stresses will vary slightly from the meter as a perfectly regular beat, or because the author chooses to alter the pattern for a foot or two. What is created then is an area of meaning and sound which was not originally intended. This discovered sound and meaning, as well as the originally intended sounds and meanings, constitute the poem. The demand of the meter forces the poet to introduce slight irrelevancies as he fulfills the form. This act engages not merely a mechanical trickery but the poet's imagination:

Soon the poet comes upon a kind of irrelevance that seems desirable, and he begins to indulge it voluntarily, as a new and positive asset to the meaning.

Likewise, as the meanings begin to force changes in the meter, they introduce new possibilities for the music of the verse. Ransom did not want this process understood in a mechanical way; certainly the great poets can reach directly for inspired meanings and sounds, but the metric process further enriches their conception just as surely.

Meter is thus not a technical trick, but a liberation from our preconceptions about the poem in our minds, a way of exploring ideas and sounds that are easily ignored in the rush to self-expression. It is ultimately a moral discipline that keeps the selfish subjectivity of the poet from overwhelming either the objects of his poem or the process of communication with future generations who only wish to share his art. It is not difficult to imagine that Ransom's “The Equilibrists,” one of the greatest poems of this century, is not only about the love between man and woman, but about the love that must mediate between the poet and his poem, or between the idea and the form:

At length I saw these lovers fully were come
Into their torture of equilibrium;
Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.
And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
About the clustered night their prison world,
They burned with fierce love always to come near,
But Honor beat them back and kept them clear.

In his formulation of the problem of meter, Ransom felt not only that he had analyzed an operative method, but that he had described something of the ontological sense of traditional poets, or, more simply, all poets. He had sketched some of the aspirations and processes by which an artist could make his adjustments between form and subject, thing and idea, useful object and object-in-itself which might result in a poem rather than a statement of concepts. To him it was not impossible that free verse writers could write about the world around them, but he had his doubts about the sense of the world they would express:

A world of appearances, suggests, for example, the world of Heraclitus; as if they had knocked the bottom out of history and language and had become early Greeks again … Their early Greek is pluralist, relativist, and irrational. Their poetry is the manifest of such a skepticism, and virtual if tacit abjuration, as to seem to subject this generation to the category of decadence—if we know enough about the cycle of a culture to apply the term responsibly.

But Ransom fought all his life against a decadence he seemed to suspect might just yet win. He was the kind of gentlemanly democrat that did not sloganeer for the rights of the little man. Nevertheless, when he disappeared Saturday after Saturday, unwittingly creating a mystery about his actions, it was only appropriate when it was discovered that he was down at the town dump playing poker with the townsmen. Ransom felt that replacing a natural love of one's family and neighbors with a radical rhetoric of the common man only contributed, in national and other socialisms, to what Yeats called “the growing murderousness of the century.” One particularly significant letter in his fifty-year-long correspondence with Allen Tate expresses the concerns of the poet with his usual courageous grace:

(1) I want to find the experience that is in the common actuals;

(2) I want this experience to carry (by association of course) the dearest possible values to which we have attached ourselves;

(3) I want to face the disintegration or nullification of these values as calmly and religiously as possible.

Perhaps he expressed his irritation at that disintegration with better wit in “Prelude To an Evening”:

Do not enforce the tired wolf
Dragging his infected wound homeward
To sit tonight with the warm children
Naming the pretty kings of France.

Ransom as literary critic explicitly declared he wanted to show that art is a way of knowing, fully as complex and far more inclusive than science and the social sciences that presume to make a science of men and women. It was a job worth doing and his literary essays and philosophical speculations contributed much to it. The books and essays of Ransom comprise one of the great criticisms of poetry written in our century. Critic Thornton Parsons is no more than just when he asks, “Who besides Eliot can match Ransom for prolific output of critical essays consistent with lucidity, point, and rhetorical finish?”

But Ransom's influence was perhaps even greater as the founder of The Kenyon Review and The Kenyon School of Letters. Much of his greatest work lay in his teaching, a task that this accomplished and famous man of letters never despised. If a teacher is measured by his students, we need only look at a partial list of those writers who once studied with Ransom: Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, Cleanth Brooks, Andrew Lytle, Jean Stafford, and Peter Taylor. His teaching methods laid great emphasis upon carefully reading the work of art and trying to see what it said before any theories were spun about it.

One of his most brilliant students, the critic Lewis P. Simpson, tells of the day the poet taught Henry James's “Daisy Miller.” Ransom began to read the first words of the story aloud to make some point, but became so swept up in James's genius that he went on reading. For two days, through two class sessions, he could do nothing but read the tale to his flinty-hearted graduate students. At the end of the story there was not a dry eye in the room.

If we wish to appreciate John Crowe Ransom, there is no better way than to follow his own example of teaching James. We should look with love and attention to an author whose poetry “does not use nature as a means but as an end; it goes out into nature not as a predatory conqueror and despoiler but as an inquirer, to look at nature as nature naturally is, and see what its own reception there may be.” If we are to believe a critic as astute as Cleanth Brooks, writing in “The Doric Delicacy,” Ransom's poetry “has worn very well indeed, outlasting verse that once appeared a great deal more exciting or profound. It belongs to that small body of verse which, one predicts, will increasingly come to be regarded as the truly distinguished verse of the twentieth century.” Randall Jarrell once compared Ransom to “Wyatt, Campion, Marvell, and Mother Goose.” While these are fine and fitting colleagues, perhaps it is better to see in Ransom a spirit as passionately religious and sensual as John Donne's, or as Brooks suggests, John Milton's. True, the Fugitive poet was more decorous than Donne in manner and mode. True also that when Ransom abandoned writing poems for literary criticism he inflicted a “deep dynastic wound” on the world of poetry. But in a time of war and dissolution he wrote of honor, love, tradition, and order. In an era of abstractions and murky intuitions, he was a passionate advocate for intellectual vigor and lucidity. And in a century of modernism and vers libre, he insisted that both poetry and the poet require the liberation and permanence of metrical form.