Selected Poems

by John Crowe Ransom

Working within the domain of consciously reduced elements, Auster pushes language to its breaking point, locating the sayable within the shifting tumult of the real, and revealing a poetic voice that has been consistently faithful to its visionary impulses.

Genres: Poetry, American

159 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 1969

Reviews

[Illiterate]

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

[Mark]

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]

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]

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]

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]

These are amazing.