John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom



John Crowe Ransom believed that criticism is a kind of anaylsis for literary technic. It is an uncovering of an art by which a writer achieves cobbled together metaphor, sound, and meaning. He believed that representation was just re-representation. For example, when you say to someone "guess just what happened to me?" Then  you re-tell the story.  One of my favorite quotes in Criticism, Inc. was when he said " the critic should regard the poem as nothing short of a desperate ontological or metaphysical manuevre. The poet himself, in the agony of composition, has something like this sense of his labors. The poet perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch. His poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, and qualitatively infinite." What Ransom is trying to tell us is that art is better than life. A poet captures art in language and language never fades. It will always be concrete and beautiful. The poem captures beauty and joy for forever. If we are having a bad day, art will still be beautiful. It will still be able to take our breath away and that is something that will never change.

Below is a great article on Ransom published by the Poetry Foundation

The video that I have put below is one of Ransom's poems. I thought it was a very beautiful, powerful, and sad poem.