The Poet and Second Thoughts: A Ransom Note

Abstract

In 1948, John Crowe Ransom’s former student Robert Lowell 1 wrote: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, and 2John Crowe Ransom were all born between 1875 and 1888. … Who outranks whom will be disputed; but one would hesitate to call the least of these seven small, and it is perhaps no longer doubtful that the good poems of all must last as long as the language. 2 Williams, Moore, Pound, and Eliot are now seen as the canonical Modernist poets; Frost and Stevens are no less major and indispensable American originals. But John Crowe Ransom does not seem to fit in this honor roll. He is now remembered for a few regularly anthologized poems. Like Eliot, he was an important editor and critic. And he was an influential teacher—indeed, some of his students are almost certainly more widely-read now than he is: Anthony Hecht, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, Peter Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, James Wright, and others, in addition to Lowell. But to bracket him with the six poets Lowell does seems either like wishful thinking or like that more interesting phenomenon by which the vibrant three-dimensionality of a writer, when alive, does not necessarily survive in the work on the printed page. Lowell understands this when he writes, “Ransom’s language is the language of his prose and of his conversation; it could only have come out of his personality and culture. … To appreciate the language of Ransom’s poems, you must realize that it is the language of one of the best talkers that has ever lived in the United States …”. 3