Selected Poems

by John Crowe Ransom

When John Crowe Ransom’s Selected Poems was given the 1964 National Book Award in Poetry, the citation “John Crowe Ransom is a poet whose unmistakable voice -- ironic, wayward, gentle and infallibly human -- has registered itself for many years in poetry that is an ornament to American letters. His Selected Poems may be compared, in number, to the poems of Andrew Marvell, and are likely to be as imperishable.” This third edition contains poems from Ransom’s earlier volumes, Poems about God, Chills and Fever, and Two Gentlemen in Bonds, which he has revised and added to this collection. The final section is made up of eight “pairings” -- original texts of poems side by side with later revisions. In each instance Ransom provides an informal commentary, pinpointing his dissatisfaction with the old version and analyzing the creative impulse (and technical means) that shaped the new -- an unusual revelation of the poet at work. This is an invaluable, indeed unique, collection by a distinguished poet who has long occupied an important place in contemporary American poetry. John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) was an educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism and as a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist.

Genres: Poetry, American

159 pages, Hardcover

First published June 25, 1969

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tone: detached, understated, somewhat aesthetic. Themes: lost chivalry, people lacking direction, life and death. Evaluation: nondescript.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The times have not been kind to John Crowe Ransom, and it's not easy to find much of his work in print anymore. Thus, I was happy to find a secondhand copy of this book at a great used bookstore earlier this year. After reading this volume, I sadly have to say I understand why his work isn't very fashionable anymore. He wrote about modern times with a very traditional style that seems very ill suited for the task. If I was rating this on the dozen or so gems in the book, I'd give it five stars. However, after that top tier, the drop-off is pretty severe.

[Richard Epstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the things about Ransom's poems is that you would never mistake them for anyone else's. Of course you might say the same thing about the poems of William McGonagall, but I wish you wouldn't.

Autumn days in our section
Are the most used-up thing on earth
(Or in the waters under the earth)
Having no more color nor predilection
Than cornstalks too wet for the fire

Who but Ransom?

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection suffers from the accretion and encrustation of so many words that the subject in so many of the poems is lost. A prime example is “The Equilibrists,” in which the would-be sexual expression of the bodiless lovers amounts to mere formalist ejaculations. Spectral lovers indeed! A couple of stanzas from “Her Eyes” demonstrate the metronomic meter and relentless rhyme schemes of Ransom’s style:

“To a woman that I knew
We’re eyes of an extravagant hue,
They were china blue.

Those I wear upon my head
Are sometimes green and sometimes red,
I said.”

While Ransom was engaged in these old-fashioned poetical histrionics, his contemporaries (Loy, Pound, H.D., Williams, Moore, Stevens) were engaged in linguistic experiments (Modernism, Imagism, etc.) that would redefine poetics and exemplify the new poetry of the Twentieth Century.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of the poems made no sense whatsoever but the good poems were worth looking out for. Reminded me of Wallace Stevens in this regard.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are amazing.