POETS Day! John Crowe Ransom

As a fan of blazers, light sweaters, and undershirts I celebrate the slow but welcome change to slightly cooler highs. If such things repulse you, or even annoy you to a slight degree (Hah!), I’m sorry. The sunny hot times are waning.

I don’t know where you live. This may be too late, but there could be some swelter left in the wide sky part of the day. Get out there and sweat when the sun is highest. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Not many t-shirt afternoons left so don’t squander them working. Have POETS Day in the sunshine. Go. Be on your way.

But as per usual, take a moment for a little verse.

***

First, the elephant in the room: the guy had a bad-ass name. A surname is a surname so his patents may not be due any credit for the cool-sounding kicker. Crowe was his mother’s maiden name and John was his father’s first name too, so John Crowe Ransom as a moniker was a matter of judicious assembly. They could have screwed it up, though. John James Ransom was a preacher in small town Tennessee; a Methodist so probably not as fire and brimstone as some of the neighbors and less likely to need anti-venom, but any preacher’s son risks the possibility of facing the world as Ada Hezekiah or Enoch Zerubbabel. I might read a poem by Enoch Zerubbabel Ransom, but his first task as a poet would be overcoming my giggle. Nobody needs that headache.

John Crowe – and I think you have to say the two names together with an implied hyphen like you would John Paul or Mary Beth – sounds numinous. He’s a half-Indian warrior guide who saves an expedition foolish enough to ignore his earlier warnings, straight out of James Fenimore Cooper. He’s an outlaw so mean, he once shot a man for snoring too loud. Or more modern, he’s a wizened Kerouac reading high school dropout biker whose gang scares off the preppies so Eric Stoltz can have his dream date. It’s a larger-than-life name. His parents did him well.

He returned the favor. He would, I think, have made any parents proud. At fifteen he started at Vanderbilt, took two years off to teach, first seventh and eighth grade and then Latin and Greek specifically, earned a Rhodes scholarship and studied at Christ Church College, Oxford. On graduation, he fought joined the English department faculty at Vanderbilt, took time off to fight a bit as part of an artillery unit in Europe, and came back.

He was a founding member of the literary group The Fugitives, and if John Crowe Ransom sounded bad-ass, John Crowe Ransom of the Fugitives evokes a mystique Steve McQueen would envy. With fellow Fugitives Alan Tate and Robert Penn Warren and eight others either Fugitive or unaffiliated, he contributed to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, arguing for an industrial rather than agrarian south.

In 1937 he baffled many by leaving Vanderbilt and taking a position at Kenyon College in not-very-cooly-named Gambier, Ohio. There he founded The Kenyon Review, which almost immediately took its place among the most influential of American literary publications. His 1941 book, New Criticism, spawned an eponymous movement focusing on close reading and a treatment of the text without externalities. He was not as prolific a poet as he was a critic, but his work in both has endured. Richard Tillinghast writes in “John Crowe Ransom: Tennessee’s major minor poet” (The New Criterion, February 1997):

“Whether he gave up poetry or whether poetry gave him up, we have no way of knowing. But during his eleven years in the art John Crowe Ransom succeeded in accomplishing what few poets have been capable of doing. Young writers today talk about “finding a voice”: I suspect Ransom would have found that amusing. I doubt that he ever lay awake at night worrying about “voice”; yet his is one of the most distinctive in the history of poetry. More importantly, and beyond being a past master of his medium, he had a world, a culture, a point of view, and a language.”

While reading about him I was, of course, struck by his accomplishments but I read about the lives of remarkable poets all the time and I’ve come to expect exceptionalism. Ransom was a giant, but so was Eliot and so was one from last month, etc. I’ve found little things stand out to me; a bit of arcana here and there or a precociousness. What caught me about Ransom was that he paused his Vanderbilt education to teach.

Part of what made me take note can be put to circumstance. Around the same time I read about Ransom’s life, my twelve year old declared a great unfairness: “A teacher only has to teach one subject but I have to know about all of them.” On my Twitter feed, a great debate raged over home schooling and teacher qualifications. It wasn’t Cicero, but it raged.

The flashpoint seemed to be a tweet that asked “how insulting is it to teachers who literally train specifically to teach kids of a certain age a specific subject that Ashton and his trad wife think they can do it just as well in the playroom of their log cabin mansion?” Predictably, literacy rates were tossed around in condemnation of the status quo, mock vapors were had that someone might favor a child’s education over the teacher’s feelings, and a whole, whole lot was said about education degrees and how those have become a prerequisite in so many areas. One professor, who’s a very impressive poet and critic in his own right, remarked “The best school systems I know specifically exclude people with education degrees.” The back and forth – “You don’t know enough about twenty subjects” vs. “You don’t know how home-schooling works” – erupted variously but simultaneously. I could visit the argument unfolding separately in multiple follows’ timelines. Lots of YELLING. And then it was gone. Some fresh outrage, I suppose.

I remember alumni of high school coming back after college to teach for a year or so before moving on to graduate school or whatnot. They weren’t sure what they wanted to do with themselves yet, but they were clever and passionate about calculus or Napolean. Most went on to whatnot, but some discovered a calling and stayed. One guy who graduated a year ahead of me came back for “a year.” He’s teaching my son economics.

As an education degree becomes more and more a requirement and education departments are set up as gate keepers, a lot of minds are shut out. Those who made an early decision to teach become the pool. Thankfully, we aren’t there yet, but knowing how one’s supposed to teach seems on the verge of eclipsing knowing something to teach.

A seventeen- or nineteen-year-old un-degreed Ransom would be right out. He turned out to be an extreme case, but there are non-extreme and capable people willing to pass on what they’ve learned for a term but aren’t willing to invest what’s expected of a careerist. Nationally, our educational apparatus is an embarrassment. We shouldn’t be turning away ambitious people.

I’ve read comments lauding Ransom’s poetic wit. I’ve chosen these two poems for the week because they show insight informed by wit. The first is funny, though unkindly so; a man and a woman see a situation differently. The second is sad; a man remembers a disliked boy on the occasion of his death in contrast to how the boy is remembered by those who loved him. In both we’re reminded of other’s perspectives and in the second more than the first, that we judge harshly even when we know deeply that we shouldn’t. There’s guilt in the persona’s observation.

 Piazza Piece
John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)

—I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying
To make you hear. Your ears are soft and small
And listen to an old man not at all,
They want the young men’s whispering and sighing.
But see the roses on your trellis dying
And hear the spectral singing of the moon;
For I must have my lovely lady soon,
I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying.

—I am a lady young in beauty waiting
Until my truelove comes, and then we kiss.
But what grey man among the vines is this
Whose words are dry and faint as in a dream?
Back from my trellis, Sir, before I scream!
I am a lady young in beauty waiting.

 

Dead Boy

The little cousin is dead, by foul subtraction,
A green bough from Virginia’s aged tree,
And none of the county kin like the transaction,
Nor some of the world of outer dark, like me.

A boy not beautiful, nor good, nor clever,
A black cloud full of storms too hot for keeping,
A sword beneath his mother’s heart—yet never
Woman bewept her babe as this is weeping.

A pig with a pasty face, so I had said,
Squealing for cookies, kinned by poor pretense
With a noble house.  But the little man quite dead,
I see the forbears’ antique lineaments.

The elder men have strode by the box of death
To the wide flag porch, and muttering low send round
The bruit of the day.  O friendly waste of breath!
Their hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound.

He was pale and little, the foolish neighbors say;
The first-fruits, saith the Preacher, the Lord hath taken;
But this was the old tree’s late branch wrenched away,
Grieving the sapless limbs, the short and shaken.

I like Tillinghast’s phrase: “major minor poet.” Ransom’s precise word choice and easy formalism are things of wonder. I’m very fond of both poems, but the professor, who’s a very impressive poet and critic in his own right, I mentioned earlier warned me off buying Poems About God, Ransom’s first collection. According to him, Ransom doesn’t hit his stride until “Necrological.” I can’t find a publishing date for “Necrological” and my copy of The Complete Poems doesn’t arrive until tomorrow. I kind of hope that these predate his stride arrival. These are great, better would be even better.

The picture at the top of this post makes me snicker. Such a bad-ass name. Such a Coolidge-esque look about him.