The Mississippi Quarterly, September 22nd, 1993
The critical tendency to study John Crowe Ransom's poetry as it uses and critiques irony does not adequately explain the linguistic role of the poems. Ransom's use of the 'I' as speaker, along with sometimes mock-poetic diction, has led many critics to attribute to the narrator an ironic personae. This fails to consider the way in which the speaker is separate from the poem's form. The 'I', then, is not a grounded identity but a voice that is paradoxically involved and detached in a poetically grounded language that can exist separate from the narrator.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry i...
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