In the following essay, Brooks recollects his personal friendship with Ransom and examines several of his poems that provide insight into his life.

In the following essay, Cowan elucidates Ransom's Southern attitude toward women as evinced in his poetry.

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.”

In the following essay, Vesterman analyzes the meter of “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter.”

In the following essay, Masselink offers a prosodical study of Ransom's poetry and delineates the disparity between the subject of meter in his critical writings and his use of it in his own verse.

In the following essay, Tillinghast discusses Ransom as a significant minor American poet.

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 the following essay, Quinlan contends that the religious themes of the poems comprising Poems about God reflect Ransom's early religious development.

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

[Ransom's] appreciation of Allen Tate, written in honor of Tate's sixtieth birthday,… leads us into the heart of his own attitude toward experience. For in this essay Ransom offers the reader a detailed examination of the character of his subject, as much as of his literary achievement. He makes us see what he thinks of Tate not only as a poet and novelist but also as a man, and what he thinks of him is defined in principle in the opening sentence: "The poet, the thinker, the who...

The key to John Crowe Ransom's criticism may lie in his creation and use of a persona who speaks in a modest yet intelligent, ingratiating yet committed manner. The issue of the persona is an important one for Ransom, one that he deals with frequently in his criticism, and his own best poetry shows able use of the device. In terms of its function in poetry, Ransom regards the persona as necessary for the poet's anonymity…. Although Ransom maintains a distinction between poetry and prose...

The greatest stumbling-block to understanding ["The Equilibrists"] is the moral contradiction that holds Ransom's lovers in their state of equilibrium, the curious duality of their allegiance to both chastity and passion…. The lovers are not caught in a struggle to resist a lesser for a higher good, whether that higher good be the things of the spirit or the pleasures of the flesh. Instead, they perform a delicate balancing act, maintaining a fine equipoise between two equally de...

In the following excerpt, Young provides an overview of Ransom's early verse, contending that few poets of Ransom's generation “have been able to represent with greater accuracy and precision the inexhaustible ambiguities, the paradoxes and tensions, the dichotomies and ironies that make up modern life.”

The modern poet more often than his predecessors has had to be a critic too, to define his presuppositions, since there were few that he could easily inherit. He has had to invent a dialect for himself, or pick out an eclectic one from the stores of the past, for there was none that was settled and generally available. One way of approaching Ransom's poetry would be through his criticism. Another would be through details of language and style. If I begin by picking about in these areas apparently at ...

John Crowe Ransom has done a strange thing [in rewriting "Conrad in Twilight,"]: he has made an extension and a transformation. Even while the method is maintained. So that time and choice, which can bear the rhyme away, have with this poem borne it back again in a different life…. Years after "Conrad in Twilight," its first life, the poem has taken on a second life whose meaning is based on—and contradicts—the first. "Master's in the Garden Aga...

Ransom possesses a talent sufficiently rare among living critics and poets: he is able, as far as the evidence appears, to mark the scansion of a line of poetry correctly. But the theory of meter which he erects upon this ability is less admirable than the ability itself. The theory contains two main propositions: the first, that meter is not a means of expressing any part of the meaning or feeling of the poem, but that it offers an independent phonetic pleasure of its own; the second, that such independent...

In the following essay, Fowler locates the “emotional life” of “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter” in the comical and enchanting encounter between the geese and the little girl.

In the following essay, Hecht discusses Ransom as a modernist and an ironist and explicates his poems “Captain Carpenter” and “Philomela.”

[What Mr. Ransom pleads for in "The New Criticism" is] a rather commonsensible way of looking at poetry. He asks us to regard it not as an instrument for setting up useful psychological mechanisms, nor as a set of documents to be studied by the literary historian, nor yet as the expression of more or less valuable ethical doctrines, but rather to recognize poetry as offering a knowledge of the world in which we live, as distinct from the world of scientific discourse, and to judge a poem on th...

In the following essay, Jones provides an interpretation of a specific line of the poem “Good Ships.”

As one looks back over Ransom's writings on art, poetry, and criticism, the qualities which appear are not always favorable to his standing as a theorist. Though he published nearly thirty essays on these subjects … over a span of nearly forty years, he repeated himself again and again and he kept his speculations within a rather remarkably narrow range. Yet though he went over the same ground many times, he retained in his treatment a quality of amateurishness. This is partially an effect of ...

Mr. Ransom has written ["The World's Body,"] a distinguished book about poetry—a volume of essays that consider the subject from various standpoints, dealing now with the aesthetics of poetry, now the theory of criticism as well as with poetry itself. (p. 462) But he has not attempted to give us any systematic theory of literary criticism. The book is simply intended as a collection of ideas that may serve as a basis for some such system.

The real contribution of the New Critics lies not so much in their providing a method for examining a poem as it does in their providing an account of the essential structure possessed by all lyric poems. Once a sense of the basic stuff of the poem is grasped, the method to be followed in analyzing it presents itself quite naturally and unmistakably. "A poem," Mr. Ransom tells us, "is a logical structure having a local texture." He then proceeds to distinguish these two basic ele...

In the following essay, Coulthard argues that the protagonist of “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter” is not the young girl, but the girl's neighbor and narrator of the poem.

In the following essay, Coulthard links “Vision of Sweetwater” to the Susanna story in the biblical Apocrypha.

In addition to its function as a statement of attitude towards poetry, The New Criticism lays out a project for the technical analysis of poetry (an exposition that is developed through analysis of key terms in the criticism of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, William Empson, Yvor Winters, and the "semasiologist," Charles W. Morris). These local contests are fascinating to watch, but we must here confine ourselves to the general thesis that grows out of this dialectical interchange. (p. 130) [Rans...

[Here] is a poet of middling ambition and gifts, with a stubborn individuality, a poet who has been a most learned and lifelong critic and theoretician of the art, who knows how to think deeper into poetry than anyone you may name, but also how to write simply, more clearly, dispassionately and genially, with ease and wit, than anyone in the business has managed to do in our critic-besotted "academic" time. Endurance has been the central problem of the arts in the 20th century, and we all know...

[John Crowe Ransom never deviated] from his love for the graces of a civilization and from his faith in the rituals and sanctions of a tradition. This is not to say that he was a conventional writer or thinker—his sensibility was much too keen, his mind much too fine, for sterile conformism. His spare output of poems, exquisitely tuned, oblique, ardent but understated, leavened by irony, is the gift of his that we treasure most, because it delights us and because it encourages us to believe in the po...