Word: ransoming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Fortnight ago, a silver-haired Southern gentleman named John Crowe Ransom stood up in Manhattan to receive the 1964 National Book Award for poetry. As founder and editor of the Kenyon Review, mentor to a platoon of celebrated poets and writers, and father of the New Criticism, Ransom is probably the most influential U.S. scholar-critic of the past 40 years. As the author of a few slender books of poetry, he has drawn the highest praise from the knottiest intellectuals of his time...
...Poems (Knopf; $4) could not be usefully perused without benefit of The Golden Bough, Kierkegaard, or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Not so. Many of Ran som's gentle verses deal in genteel terms with subjects easily apprehended by the lingering tea-and-antimacassar set in Ransom's own home town of Pulaski, Tenn. His topics run to ceremonious family occasions, chivalric legends, brief encounters between might-have-been lovers, small social events, the death of a boy, even the demise of a child's pet hen that has been stung to death...
Taken alone, deceptively simple poems like this seem to lack substance. But like the threads of a spider web, a garland of such verse woven together creates a captivating world. Its charm, perhaps, is that it seems oldfashioned. Ransom's courtly poetic rhetoric seems antique to the ear of an age that banned charm and rhetoric from poetry in order to come to grips with life. Newcomers wandering in Ransom's poetic kingdom are likely to bark a shin on such arch words as "pernoctated," or be mildly astonished at the poet's unfashionable fondness for bucolic...
Frozen Dust. Customarily a cavalier poet, even about serious subjects, Ransom sometimes compresses feeling under a surface of grave understatement that eventually reveals, like New England reticence, the hidden vein of pure joy or grief beneath. In the small encounters that he chronicles, a clash of two points of view or a strange moment of fear is often apprehended with a sudden, minute clarity, like two specks of dust frozen in the searchlight of a morning shaft...
Rapturous Piety. Unabashedly, Ransom describes a lyric poem as "an act of rapturous piety; a homage to human nature despite its hateful and treacherous tendencies." Dry, knit-browed New Critics, trying to justify their unexpected fondness for such a man, are often as unsuccessful as connoisseurs trying to convey the exact flavor of a vintage wine. One thing that especially endears the poet to his colleagues, however, is his fashionable fondness for antinomies -his perception that life is lived in impossible tension between unresolvable opposites. Ransom heroines die of "six spells of fever and six of burning." They have only...