SOURCE: Leithauser, Brad. “Sly Visitor.” The New Republic 205, no. 6 (5 August 1991): 36-41.

In the following review of the reissue of Ransom's Selected Poems, Leithauser determines the reasons for the poet's waning popularity and urges a reappraisal and greater attention to his verse.

In one of his sonnets John Crowe Ransom conjures up a pair of lovers with the phrase “a broken whispering by night,” words that might also describe the passing of the centenary of his birth three years ago. So far as I know, the anniversary came and went almost unmarked by the critical retrospectives, literary symposia, and ceremonial hoopla that would seem the due of an artist of his novelty and distinction. Is he still widely read? Or has this poet of whom Randall Jarrell once said, “His Selected Poems may be compared, in number, to the poems of Andrew Marvell, and are likely to be as...