SOURCE: Russell, Henry W. “John Crowe Ransom: Traditionalist, Formalist, and Critic.” The Formalist: A Journal of Metrical Poetry 1, no. 2 (1990): 15-23.

In the following essay, Russell offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Ransom's verse.

After reading the giants like Yeats and Frost, and the lesser but still great talents of Robinson and Auden, the lover of modern formal poetry can do no better than to encounter the dozen or so perfect lyrics of John Crowe Ransom. The complete selection of his poems numbers merely seventy-two, and yet it is difficult to imagine a modern writer whose poetry and criticism comprise a more highly finished and distinguished body of work. If his name seems only vaguely familiar, this is because we live in that phase of Ransom's reputation when most of his students are deceased, when many of his social ideas have either been adopted or so distorted that...