Word: ransoming
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...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...
...each other when they kiss, The pieces kiss again, no end to this ... Equilibrists lie here; stranger, tread light; Close, but untouching in each other's sight; Mouldered the lips and ashy the tall skull. Let them lie perilous and beautiful. Full of tart paradox and sweet passion, Ransom is himself a poetic equilibrist of rare skill. Girded against sentiment with irony, against dullness with wit and cerebral learning, he yet manages to convey the flavor of an innocent past when poetry was thought to treat directly of such things as Truth and Beauty. When he accepted...