SOURCE: Romine, Scott. “The Invisible I: John Crowe Ransom's Shadowy Speaker.” Mississippi Quarterly 46, no. 4 (fall 1993): 529-45.

In the following essay, Romine examines the speaker in Ransom's verse and argues that “the ironic stance usually ascribed to this figure fails to explain fully its role.”

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry introduces John Crowe Ransom with the claim that his “poems could never be mistaken for anybody else's.”¹ As introductions go, it is a good one, yet the poetry itself—like its creator—tends to stand a bit aloof, an easy acquaintance, but difficult to fathom. Robert Penn Warren has said that there is “something inconclusive” about Ransom's poems, a statement echoed by many critics and embodied in various critical debates. Is, for example, the speaker of “Dead Boy” inappropriately cold (David Perkins), or merely “objective” (Robert Buffington)?² Is Ransom's poetry best characterized as full of “mockery and playfulness...