April 30, 1888

A major American poetry resource recalls John Crowe Ransom (April 30, 1888 to July 3, 1974) for us:

'...., John Crowe Ransom was born in Pulaski, Tennessee. He received an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University in 1909, studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and served in the First World War. He became a professor at Vanderbilt and later accepted a position at Kenyon College, where he became founder and editor of The Kenyon Review, and remained there until his retirement in 1959. He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1968.

'Ransom published three slim volumes of highly acclaimed poetry, but after 1927 principally devoted himself to critical writing. He was a guiding member of the Fugitives, a group of writers who were wary of the social and cultural changes they were witnessing in the South during the early part of the twentieth century. The Fugitives sought to preserve a traditional aesthetic ideal which was firmly rooted in classical values and forms. As a critic, he had an enormous influence on an entire generation of poets and fellow academics, who subscribed to the doctrines he laid out as the “New Criticism.” His ideals were John Donne and the English metaphysical poetry of the 17th century. He believed in the poetic virtues of irony and complexity, and the importance of adhering to traditional prosodic techniques of meter, stanza, and rhyme. His own poems are marked by irony and a spare classicism, and a concern with the inevitable decay of all things human.'
....'

His books include poetry:

Poems About God (1919)
Chills and Fever (1924)
Grace After Meat (1924)
Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1926)
Selected Poems (1945)
Poems and Essays (1955)

and prose:

God Without Thunder (1931)
The World’s Body (1938)
The New Criticism (1941)
A College Primer of Writing (1943)
The Kenyon Critics: Studies in Modern Literature (1951)
Poetic Sense: A Study of Problems in Defining Poetry by Content (1971)
Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays, 1941-1970 (1997)'

Ransom's "spare classicism" does not connote cats. Still we offer this quote from the volume
Chills and fever, from a text titled "Spiel of the Three Mountebanks."

'....
If ye remark how poor I am,

Come citizens, behold my lamb!
Have ye a lion, ounce, or scourge, 

Or any beast of dainty gorge? 

Agnus lays his tender youth 

Between the very enemy's mouth. 

And though he sniff his delicate meat 

He may not bruise that flesh nor eat. 

He may not rend him limb from limb 

If Agnus do but bleat on him. 

Fierce was my youth, but like a dream 

I saw a temple and a stream, 

And where I knelt and washed my sore, 

This infant lamb stood on the shore, 

He mounted with me from the river, 

And still he cries, as brave as ever, 

"Lay me down by the lion's side 

To match my frailty with his pride! 

Fain would I welter in my blood 

To teach these lions true lionhood." 

So daily Agnus would be slain 

But daily is denied again, 

And still the hungry lions range 

While Agnus waits upon a change
....'

We do not judge Donne by those who use his name.