SOURCE: Hecht, Anthony. “Poetry: John Crowe Ransom.” The Wilson Quarterly 18, no. 2 (spring 1994): 92-3.

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

Any conventional list of the great modernist poets would begin with Eliot and Pound, Rilke, Valéry, and Rimbaud. These were not the only important poets of their era, possibly not even the greatest. One thinks of such others as Stevens, Frost, Montale, and Yeats. But the ones designated as modernist are credited with changing our whole mode of feeling, the voice and vocation of poetry itself. It is therefore surprising to recall that in 1926 two by no means negligible poets and commentators placed John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) firmly in the ranks of the modernists. Robert Graves and Laura Riding, in their still-valuable Modernist Poetry, say of Ransom's work that it is of a...