John Crowe Ransom Quotes

John Crowe Ransom — American Poet born on April 30, 1888, died on July 03, 1974

John Crowe Ransom was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist... (wikipedia)

Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.