Books: Contribution to Poetry

When Yale awarded the annual Bollingen Prize* in poetry (and $1,000) to John Crowe Ransom, no one was more surprised than John Crowe Ransom. Said that self-effacing poet, teacher and critic:

There is nothing recent of mine for the committee to have considered.”

The Bollingen committee knew all that. Tennessee-born John Ransom, professor of poetry at Ohio’s Kenyon College and editor of the Kenyon Review, has published no verse since his Selected Poems in 1945. The award, said Conrad Aiken, committee chairman, was based on Ransom’s “contribution to American poetry.”

It is a contribution that few Americans know about—whether from lack of interest or pure defensive caution. Following a modern poet up a mental slope carries real danger of getting hopelessly lost above the tree line of meaning. Lucid, logical John Ransom is not that kind of poet. Much of his poetry is as transparent as a weather report. As skillful in craft as he is slender in output, he can write movingly and hauntingly about the death of a small child, as in Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter:

There was stick speed in her little body, And such lightness in her footfall, It is no wonder that her brown study Astonishes us all.

Or worldly-wisely of the way beauty passes, as in Blue Girls:

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail . . .

For I could tell you a story which is

true:

I know a lady with a terrible tongue Blear eyes fallen from blue, All her perfections tarnished—and yet

it is not long Since she was lovelier than any of you.

Poet Ransom does become more allusive and complex than that, but he belongs in general, with those modern American poets who seem to be more interested in talking to other people (though sometimes only to other poets) than in talking to themselves. Moreover, 62-year-old John Ransom has cast an increasingly larger shadow over three decades of U S writing history. The “ferment of his ideas in the heads of his old pupils” (a phrase Ransom applies to Aristotle) has had acknowledged results. Some of his ex-pupils: Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate.

Poet Ransom keeps his own ideas in ferment, too; he is seldom satisfied with what he writes. He thinks he will publish some more verse some day—”But it will not be exactly more of the same.”

*The awards have been made by Yale since 1950. The previous administrators—the Library Congress—awarded themselves a headache with the controversial 1948 prize to Ezra Pound (TIME, Feb. 28, 1949).