John Crowe Ransom - Poet

Poet

At Vanderbilt, Ransom was a founding member of the Fugitives, a Southern literary group of 16 writers that functioned primarily as a kind of poetry workshop and included Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Under their influence, Ransom, whose first interest had been philosophy (specifically John Dewey and American pragmatism) began writing poetry. His first volume of poems, Poems about God (1919), was praised by Robert Frost and Robert Graves. The Fugitive Group had a special interest in Modernist poetry and, under Ransom's editorship, started a short-lived but highly influential magazine, called The Fugitive, which published American Modernist poets, mainly from the South (though they also published Northerners like Hart Crane). Out of all the Fugitive poets, Norton poetry editors Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair opined that, " among the most remarkable," characterizing his poetry as "quirky" and "at times eccentric."

Ransom's literary reputation is based chiefly on two collections of poetry, Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Believing he had no new themes upon which to write, his subsequent poetic activity consisted almost entirely of revising ("tinkering", he called it) his earlier poems. Hence Ransom's reputation as a poet is based on the fewer than 160 poems he wrote and published between 1916 and 1927. In 1963, the poet/critic and former Ransom student Randall Jarrell published an essay in which he highly praised Ransom's poetry:

In John Crowe Ransom's best poems every part is subordinated to the whole, and the whole is accomplished with astonishing exactness and thoroughness. Their economy, precision, and restraint gives the poems, sometimes, an original yet impersonal perfection. . .And sometimes their phrasing is magical--light as air, soft as dew, the real old-fashioned enchantment. The poems satisfy our nostalgia for the past, yet themselves have none. They are reports . .of our world's old war between power and love, between those who efficiently and practically know and those who are "content to feel/ What others understand." And these reports of battles are, somehow, bewitching. . .Ransom's poems profess their limitations so candidly, almost as a principle of style, that it is hardly necessary to say they are not poems of the largest scope or the greatest intensity. But they are some of the most original poems ever written, just as Ransom is one of the best, most original, and most sympathetic poets alive; it is easy to see that his poetry will always be cared for, since he has written poems that are perfectly realized and occasionally almost perfect."

Despite the brevity of his poetic career and output, Ransom won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1951. His 1963 Selected Poems received the National Book Award the following year.

Ransom primarily wrote short poems examining the ironic and unsentimental nature of life (with domestic life in the American South being a major theme). An example of his Southern style is his poem "Janet Waking", which "mixes modernist with old-fashioned country rhetoric."

Ransom was noted as a strict formalist, using both regular rhyme and meter in almost all of his poems. He also occasionally employed archaic diction. Ellman and O'Clair note that " defends formalism because he sees in it a check on bluntness, on brutality. Without formalism, he insists, poets simply rape or murder their subjects."