Selected Poems by John Crowe Ransom
"Selected Poems by John Crowe Ransom" is a curated anthology that showcases the poet's notable works, primarily drawn from his earlier collections "Chills and Fever" (1924) and "Two Gentlemen in Bonds" (1927). The volume features forty poems, arranged chronologically, highlighting Ransom's distinctive voice in American poetry. While he is not considered a prolific writer, Ransom's poetry is celebrated for its sensitive lyricism, narrative depth, and clever use of irony and wit. His sophisticated vocabulary and stylistic choices, such as the incorporation of archaisms and slant rhymes, are indicative of a writer who engages mature readers rather than pandering to popular trends.
Ransom's themes often explore the transient nature of beauty and the human experience of death, using humor and pathos to create a nuanced emotional landscape. Poems like "Here Lies a Lady" and "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" exemplify his ability to intertwine serious subjects with irony and satire, while also portraying the complexities of human relationships and the difficulties of communication. With an emphasis on understatement and ambiguity, Ransom invites varied interpretations of his work, making his poetry a rich tapestry of insights into life and mortality. Overall, this collection serves as a testament to Ransom's versatility and talent in capturing profound themes through an engaging poetic lens.
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Subject Terms
Selected Poems by John Crowe Ransom
First published: 1945
Type of work: Poetry
Critical Evaluation:
John Crowe Ransom, recognized as poet, social critic, and literary critic, has in this book published forty of his best poems. The slender volume has been culled principally from two earlier volumes, CHILLS AND FEVER (1924) and TWO GENTLEMEN IN BONDS (1927), with the last five poems having appeared previously only in periodicals. No poems have been included from his earliest volume, POEMS ABOUT GOD (1919). The arrangement is chronological.
Though neither a prolific nor a popular poet, Ransom, through his variety, freshness, and elegance, has won a distinguished place in American poetry. In the few poems of this volume there is ample evidence of distinction in his sensitive lyricism, his adept narratives and character portraits, and his skillful use of wit and irony.
Ransom the scholar is apparent in nearly all of the poems. The polysyllabic vocabulary and occasional use of archaisms such as “thole,” the remote allusions, and the use of ellipses and slant rhyme are characteristic of a poet writing for mature readers, unwilling to condescend to popular taste. At times the stumbling blocks seem unwarranted, like playful, mocking jokes on the reader, and the charge of obscurity, particularly in some of the later poems, is justified. However, in the majority of the poems the obstacles are not insurmountable and the reader’s effort is well rewarded.
Conclusions are never explicitly stated by Ransom; morals are never obvious. He states his theory of modern poetry and the moral, so well exemplified in his own poetry, in the essay “Poets Without Laurels”:
Pure or obscure, the modern poet manages not to slip into the old-fashioned moral-beautiful compound . . . he may take the subject nearest his own humanity, a subject perhaps of terrifying import; but in treating it will stop short of all moral or theoretical conclusions, and confuse his detail to the point where it leaves no positive implications.
Ransom’s is a poetry of understatement, in which irony is an important means of showing the implications of a situation, implications which may vary with interpretation. In “Here Lies a Lady,” for example, the surface situation is made to seem ludicrous, with the picture of husband, aunt, infant of three, and medicos hovering over the lady who burned, then froze, and finally died, “After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning.” But the irony is forceful, for this is a “lady of beauty and high degree,” like the “sweet ladies” whom the poet addresses in the last stanza, and her life appears pitifully ignominious at the end. Though her fingers fly and her eyes are confident, she makes nothing out of the maze of old lace scraps about her. Even her death lacks dignity, despite the “flowers and lace and mourning.” It is the old theme of the transience of beauty, but here presented freshly, more forceful because it is under cover.
The same theme appears in several of the other poems, most notably in the sonnet, “Piazza Piece,” in which Death, an old gentleman in a dustcoat, comes to claim the beautiful lady, and in “Blue Girls,” a carpe diem piece which combines the same gentle mocking and underlying seriousness found in “Here Lies a Lady.”
The theme of death is not always interwoven with that of transient beauty. Two of the poems, for example, deal with the death of children. “Dead Boy” does not spare satire in contrasting the glorified feeling for the dead boy with the realities of his character in life, “A pig with a pasty face, so I had said,” but the hurt is apparent, too, and even the poet recognizes in the now dead lad the nobility of his forebears. More pathetic is “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter.” Here the contrast is between the very active life of the little girl as she played in the orchard and chased the lazy geese (“Who cried in goose, ’Alas’”) to the pond, and the complete stillness of her body in death. The emotion is perfectly controlled—yet evident—as the poet states the effect of the quiet little body:
But now go the bells, and we are ready,
Another of the poems about death, “Janet Waking,” deals with a child’s first knowledge of death, the death of old Chucky, a hen. Again, the balance between humor and pathos is perfectly achieved. Through the use of exaggeration the poem even touches on the mock-heroic: The agent of death is a “transmogrifying bee” which
Came droning down on Chucky’s old
The exaggeration here is not merely for humorous effect, however. To young Janet this is an event of tremendous seriousness, and the contrast between the cause and the effect serves to point up, not play down, the pathos of the situation.
This characteristic mingling of humor and emotion may be traced through a great number of the poems. Even in the love poem, “Winter Remembered,” some of the imagery is humorous: The lonely man’s fingers, away from his love’s touch, are like “Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.” Then, the humor may at times become biting, satiric, as in “Parting, Without a Sequel,” serving to make even stronger the underlying emotion.
Ransom’s fine character portraits and short narratives at times suggest Edwin Arlington Robinson and one of Ransom’s chief influences, Thomas Hardy. In “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” we have a dreamer related to Miniver Cheevy. “Captain Carpenter” is a forcefully satiric piece about an unteachable idealist who suffers one reverse after another and yet never gives up. “Miriam Tazewell,” whose world was her flowers, went about sullen for weeks after they were destroyed in a storm.
The tragedy of many of Ransom’s characters is that they are not able to communicate. One major reason for this inability is that they live in a world of convention, which only the very young and the very old can break through. The grandfather in “Old Man Playing with Children” speaks thus to the middle-aged who make fun of him for playing Indian with the boys:
“It is you the elder to these and younger
In “Eclogue,” innocent, carefree youth is contrasted with selfish adulthood, when love is no longer freely given. Fear, also, is given here as a reason for the lack of love: The dream of Death comes suddenly, “Then metamorphosis.” “Spectral Lovers” and “The Equilibrists” describe lovers who fear showing their passion because of conventional feelings about honor:
Predicament indeed, which thus dis-
In “Two in August,” the poet, characteristically understating, tells how a husband and wife one night “did something strange” and suddenly attacked each other “with silences and words.” Similarly, though less clearly stated, the troubled tension of a domestic situation appears in “Prelude to an Evening.”
These are problems posed, not solved. “The Equilibrists,” for example, questions, half whimsically, whether it would be better to go bodiless to Heaven or to go honorless to Hell, where there is no end to kissing. And with the half-hope of Hardy in “The Darkling Thrush” or “The Oxen,” the poet says in “Somewhere is Such a Kingdom” that when even the birds start quarreling and croaking—
My dull heart I must take elsewhere;
It is impossible to deal adequately with the variety of Ransom’s poetry, ranging from allusion-packed poems such as “Philomela” to light, whimsical verse such as “Dog” and “Survey of Literature.” Though his poetic output has been relatively small, this poet has well proved his versatility and his particular talent of combining wit and irony, sometimes gentle, sometimes biting, with emotion and serious meanings.
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.