35 CHAPTER II John Crowe Ransom's first volume of poetry Poems About God was first published in 1919. Between 1922 and 1925 not just most of his best poetry was written but he also helped edit the Fugitive magazine. Between 1939 and 1959 he held the post of Editor to the Kenyon Review. The New Criticism published in 1941 has been Ransom's most renowned contribution to literary criticism that contains articles like "All Verse is Not Poetry": "Eliot and the Metaphysicals" and "Wanted an Ontological Critic". In 1955, Poems and Essays was published. This highly revered Man of Letters greatly influenced another Man of Letters - Allen Tate, (his student at Vanderbilt). According to Ransom the critic, irony was the ultimate mode of great minds as it presupposes the others : "It implies first of all an honorable strenuous period of romantic creation; it implies then a rejection of the romantic forms and formulas: but this rejection is so unwilling, and in its statements there lingers so much of the music and colour and romantic mystery which is perhaps the absolute poetry, and this statement is attended by such a disarming rueful comic sense of the poet's own betrayal, that the fruit of it is wisdom and not bitterness, poetry and not prose, health and not suicide"-^^ Irony to Ransom was the 36 rarest of the states of mind, because it is the most inclusive. The whole mind has to be active in arriving at it— both creation and criticism, poetry and science. Ransom's poems reflect these comments very well. Poetry to Ransom was an Art rather than Science and hence more preferable. The reference of science is fixed and ideal and the reference of poetry is always free and personal. In short, a poem means many things. In his famous essay "Poetry: A Note In Ontology" Ransom has classified poetry into i) Physical Poetry ii) Platonic Poetry and iii) Metaphysical Poetry. Physical Poetry deals with things or objects—things in their thinginess. Platonic poetry deals with ideas and their elaboration. But Metaphysical Poetry is "the most original and exciting, and intellectually perhaps the most seasoned, that we know in our literature, and very probably it has few equivalents in other literatures"^, Ransom has thrown special light on the miraculism in Metaphysical poetry. Further in the essay Ransom compares the literary qualities of the nineteenth century poetry to those of the seventeenth century to state:"Clearly the seventeenth century had the courage of its metaphors, and imposed them imperially on the nearest things, and just as dearly the nineteenth century lacked this courage, and was half-heartedly metaphorical, or 37 content with similies".'^ Thus Ransom has remarked on the use of conceit that constitutes both originality and miraculism in Metaphysical Poetry. According to him, the correct technique of the conceit required a basis of verisimilitude to the miracle, Ransom has stated, "Specifically the miraculism arises when the poet discovers by analogy an identity between objects which is partial,..., and proceeds to an identification which is complete."* He clarifies this position by comparing the conceit to a simile which says 'as if or 'like' and keeps the identification of objects partial. And why do poets resort to miraculism? Ransom's reason is "Platonic Poetry is too idealistic, but Physical Poetry is too realistic, and realism is tedious and does not maintain interest. The poets therefore introduce the psychological device of the miracle."^ Miraculism initiates attention as it leaves one looking, marveling and reveling in the thick thingy substance that has just received its strange representation. It suggests that the object is perceptually remarkable, and the reader had better attend to it. In another well-known essay "Wanted: An Ontological Critic" Ransom has brought out the difference between scientific discourse and aesthetic discourse. According to 38 him, the validity of a scientific discourse depends in part on its semantical purity as each symbol should refer to a specifically defined object: the reference of a single symbol is limited and uniform. Whereas in aesthetic discourse symbols are replaced with icons, and an icon peculiarly refers to the whole or concrete object and cannot be limited: "The icons here are in the mind, they are the mental images evoked. The technical use of language by the poet is one that lifts words out of their symbolic or definitive uses into imaginative or image—provoking uses. "^ Thomas Daniel Young has commented in his article "Ransom's Critical Theories: Structure and Texture" that "For Ransom the poem remains the great paradox, a. construct looking two ways, with logic trying to dominate the metaphors and metaphors trying to dominate the logic. And to this contrary twosome he adds meter to give the poem the form of a Trinitarian existence and to make its creation dependent upon a tenuous compromise between metre and sense, image and idea, metaphor and argument. From this combination of heterogeneous qualities comes almost the only defense man has against the encroachments of science and technology, for poetry is one of the few means through which man can reconstitute the qualitative particularity or 39 experience". Simply defined, poem is an organism in action— the head representing logical structure, the heart representing local texture and the feet representing the meter. Though each organ plays its separate part, it must reconcile its difference with the other two in order to ^from]a harmonious whole. In one of his letters written to Allen Tate (5 Sept.1926), Ransom has brought out three moments in the historical order of experience. While explaining the third moment he has stated that it is by images that the poet goes back to the first moment. Therefore when the poet makes images he is regressive, trying to reconstitute an experience which he once had. For this reconstitution the images come out much mixed with concepts: "What we really get, therefore by this deliberate recourse to images, is a mixed world composed of both images and concepts; or a sort of practicable reconciliation of the two worlds".^ In another letter written on 20"^*^ Feb. 1927, Ransom has warned "If you have no dear concepts, to which you have given everything in your time, your images are children's images and without meaning and substance".^ According to Ransom, the business of a literacy critic was exclusively with an esthetic criticism. The business of the moralist would be something else. He disposed of 40 various critical approaches he considered fallacious psychological, humanist, and Marxist. He recommended that ultimately the critic would have to subscribe to an ontology. In other words, he denounced the abstraction that is often associated with philosophical thinking and always demanded concreteness and specificity in Poetry. Therefore for him the true richness of a poem was to be found in its local texture of language and metaphor — not in the intended fable and theme, the logical structure or argument. "77i <^ G<B Q Ransom argued for the primacy of the concrete element - the image, not the idea; the metaphor (and conceit) , not the concept; the myth, not the dogma. But there must be conjunction of the physical object and the Platonic idea. Otherwise one gets the pure poetry of things-imagism-or the abstract poetry of ideas — allegory. In bringing together the natural object and the unattached idea the poet uses the greatest weapon in his arsenal-analogy-and if he brings it to bear properly, he forges Metaphysical poetry, thus balancing idea against fact. Ransom was less interested in the poet's choice of material than he was in the poet's actual performance. The poet's intention counted little for him; what mattered was the document which resulted from the poet's labour. How the 41 poet controls the energy of his language which provides the vehicle by which he can enclose and reveal experience was of prime importance. The language has got to be submitted to the restraining element of metre and the life-giving dimension of metaphor. Through the mechanical discipline of the metre and the miraculous play of the metaphor the poet performs his craft and makes his poems. Ransom has demonstrated time and again how important the technical dimensions of poetry are. The significance of the experience makes up the poet's fable. So plot and argument is pure structure' that is balanced by metre which is 'pure technique'; and somewhere in between lies the power of the language in idiomatic and syntactic forms modified by trope — that is the texture of the poem, But the interrelation of these three parts is subtle and complex. As far as texture (i/j concerned. Ransom continuously insisted upon the concrete particularity of the world's body or the living details of nature. However, he did not present an organic theory of poetry but wanted to present an analysis of the finished product. Ransom was against the poetry of feeling as it expresses the personality of the poet, his subjectivism, sentimentality, and self—indulgence. He stressed cognition and therefore for him the best poetry is Metaphysical. But 42 whereas it was the poetry of experience to Allen Tate, it was the poetry of knowledge to Ransom. To him emotion did make up a part of the compound but it was not and should not be dominant. He emphasized the uniqueness of poetry separating it from philosophy. He sharply attacked the poetry of ideas and in that light what he meant by Metaphysical poetry as a poetry of knowledge would be clearly intelligible. In his essay "New Poets And Old Muses" Ransom comments, "The new poet today looks back upon a half century which may have been more eventful for new poetry than any other in the history of our language, with the exception of the second half of the 16th century, and possibly its successor the first half of the 17th century."-"^^ Then he refers to Ezra Pound's advice to the poets to *Make It New' as a result of which the poets founded many innovations and engineered many revolutions.