operating in Jonson a kind of wit that is no longer available to us. Eliot, then, is not only a first-rate practitioner of modern poetry, but a man pre-eminently concerned with the rediscovery of his poetic tradition, and with its emulation.

Ransom then takes up Eliot's famous description of the Metaphysical poets and both supports and criticizes it. He acknowledges that certain metaphysical poems, like John Donne's "Valediction," have a kind of unique status and power. The compass imagery of this poem, which, since the work of Eliot and Cleanth Brooks has become part of the baggage of literary criticism, is acknowledged to have very strong powers of definition. Yet, unlike Eliot and Brooks, Mr. Ransom believes that such imagery is not self-justifying. He states that imagery and conceit are only elements of a poem, layers of its texture. The danger of such long and intricately developed patterns of language is that texture dominates the body of the poem and threatens its fullest meanings: it offers a part when we should be seeing the whole. In addition, he shows that the poetry of conceit becomes too particularized and therefore too restricted in its communication.

When Ransom takes up the central matters of Eliot's criticism and religion, he points out that Eliot insists upon religious belief. He is our most important religious poet as well as our first important modern historical poet. He adds that Eliot is particularly a Christian writer, one grounded deeply in the Anglican tradition. Ransom is particularly illuminating when he follows a controversy between Eliot and more secular thinkers. In this argument with the followers of Irving Babbitt, Eliot expressed distrust of what he called the positivistic tendencies of Humanism. His criticism is grounded not on the rational content of Humanism but on its capacities for intuitive belief. On this issue Ransom disagrees strongly, and he rebukes Eliot for being too distrustful of the ways of modern secular thought.

The third of the interpretations is centered on Yvor Winters, whom Ransom calls the critic best at interpreting the structure of a poem. Winters is strongest, and perhaps most restricted, by virtue of his commitment to ethical poetry. Indeed, Ransom indicates, any other aspect of poetry seems to Winters to be negligible. Yet Winters is not guilty of external and commonplace moralism; he is not a modern Bowdler to whom the moral is worth more than the poem. This thesis is borne out by Ransom's study of "The Morality of Poetry" an essay central to the development of Yvor Winters. In this essay Winters claims that the intention of a poem is not really known to the poet when he addresses himself to the act of writing. It is the total meaning of the finished poem, which is expressed by the fact that it has attachments to local and particular things, that transcends the simple intention of writing it. For Winters the force of a poem consists in its author's attempt to come to terms with an experience and to order thereby a meaning for his own consciousness.

Ransom adds that Winters is at his best when he grapples with particulars; unlike Hart Crane or Yeats he does not evade moral issues by escaping from this world and celebrating the powers of a less defined and natural realm. In sum, then, he is to be valued insofar as he has a grasp of actuality and of the moral alternatives it offers.

The concluding section of THE NEW CRITICISM is titled "Wanted: An Ontological Critic." In this part of the book Ransom argues that the best mode of critical attack on poetry is to differentiate the poem from other modes of discourse. Poetry, he states, is really revolutionary in that it departs from the conventions of ordinary communication. Ordinary scientific discourse deals with only single values at a time, yet in a literary structure like HAMLET we may be dealing with particulars that do not have fully finite definitions. For example, each time that Hamlet appears—or perhaps each time we interpret a varying action of his—he appears to be quite different from our last experience of him. Art, in other words, deals with qualities that are not consistent in the scientific sense.

THE NEW CRITICISM concludes with a consideration of how art is different from the ordinary modes of life and how poetry differs from scientific expression. Ransom points out that in certain poems (he uses Andrew Marvell's "Coy Mistress") the poet is not really concerned with a logical and predictable chain of statements but with a kind of irrelevance that seems either necessary or desirable. The principle of poetry, then, is connected not with statement but with imagination; when Marvell adds to a love poem his complex allusions to the conversion of the Jews or the chronology of the world, what he is doing is developing the particularity without which the body of the poem would remain abstract and theoretical. As far as Ransom is concerned, the texture of the poem is not really separable from its statement. THE NEW CRITICISM ends by asserting this fact through demonstration.

Bibliography

• Brooks, Cleanth. "John Crowe Ransom: As I Remember Him." American Scholar 58, no. 2 (Spring, 1989): 211-233.
• Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959.
• Howard, Maureen. "There Are Many Wonderful Owls in Gambier." Yale Review 77 (Summer, 1988): 521-527.
• Malvasi, Mark G. The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
• Modern American Poetry Web site. "John Crowe Ransom." http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ransom/life.htm.
• Quinlan, Kieran. John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
• Rubin, Louis D., Jr. "The Wary Fugitive: John Crowe Ransom." Sewanee Review 82 (1974): 583-618.
• Young, Thomas Daniel. Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.