Arts and Letters

John Crowe Ransom was born, in 1888, in the little town of Pulaski, Tennessee. His father was a scholarly Methodist minister who had translated the Bible into Portuguese. At Vanderbilt University, the son devoted himself to Latin and Greek, but interrupted his studies by a stint of teaching in Sullivan Hollow, Mississippi—a region reputed to be the last refuge for men whom the law, but nobody else, wanted—and there, as not a few Americans before him, Ransom read his Plato in the wilderness. Later, at Oxford, he proceeded to an Honor's Degree in classics, with concentration in Greek Philosophy.

Upon his return to America Ransom, after a year of teaching in New England, moved to a small Southern university, with minimal salary and little chance for advancement; with that choice repudiating the sort of career that his powers of mind must have persuasively proposed to him. I do not suggest that this repudiation was in order to devote himself to poetry. Poetry had not yet entered the picture. It was, rather, to seek a certain kind of life for which he had a pious attachment. I have heard him say, "Life must come first"—and anyone who ever entered his house would have known it to be the habitat of a deep joy in life—a place where work was play and play was work, because of an abounding energy and the intensity of the life-sense.

Poetry did, however, eventually enter the picture, and more than once Ransom said that he wanted to be a "domestic poet." In a letter he developed this notion, saying that he wanted to find, in his poetry, "the experience that is in the common actuals"; that he wanted "this experience to carry (by association of course) the dearest possible values to which we can attach ourselves"; and that he wanted "to face the disintegration or multiplication of those values as religiously and calmly as possible."* Most of his poems are, on the surface at least, small, common, domestic. A little girl finds her pet hen dead. A man, waking, loses his bright morning dream, and his wife Jane becomes "only Jane." A lover mourns the absence of his beloved.

Ransom is, then, no poet of modern alienation. Rather, one of reconciliation. But the poet is hard-minded and knows the inescapable biological, historical, and philosophical contexts which dictate that all reconciliation is doomed to be imperfect and fleeting, and that tenderness must ultimately exist in the long perspective of irony. If he is a poet of sentiment, he is a critic of rigorous mind, with an astute sense in his own poetry as in his poetic theory, of the technical aspects of the literary art. And I should emphasize that for him the polarity of rigor of mind and warmth of heart, though generating an inevitable irony, represents inevitable dimensions of man's fully realized life. But rigor and tenderness, hard-headedness and love—these, in man and work, were united, beyond irony, in a sense of grave joy. I remember a letter in which the poet said that he rather liked getting old, for age made even more precious to him "all small, furry things, like kittens and children."

John Crowe Ransom died calmly in his sleep, on July 3 of this year, at the age of 86. He once said that, in writing a poem, what he always wanted to do was to make "a beautiful thing." He made many beautiful things, in which a classic purity of outline and modern intensities and tensions find a unique fusion. And these things, speaking to the heart in their special accent, bear all the marks of being a permanent treasure—at least as long as the heart prizes the "common actuals" of life. And it should be added, as long as the mind values even painful veracity more than self-indulgence and philosophic vision more than delusion.

John Crowe Ransom died with many honors, and this Academy honored itself by his election in 1966 to Chair number 46, as the fifth occupant.

*In a letter to Allen Tate