This afternoon the latest issue of The Hudson Review landed in my mailbox with the satisfying thump of old-school print media, and it's a fine issue, with writing by Alfred Corn, William H. Pritchard, Dean Flower on Nabokov's letters, Carol T. Christ on Jeanette Winterson, and much else, including my own essay, "John Crowe Ransom's Quarrel With Himself." It starts like this:
The rest is available in the Spring 2016 issue of the magazine, available now!
Once, in the waning days of the nineteenth century, a southern preacher’s son quarreled with his father about the place of human happiness in God’s plan. He pointed defiantly to the world’s disorder as proof that God cared little for our desires, but he was too much his father’s son not to doubt his own position, not to wonder if benevolent Providence could be real. He carried his doubts with him when, years later, he sat down to write. That preacher’s son was John Crowe Ransom, and the quarrel with the father became a quarrel with himself, from which sprang his poetry. Later, his doubts resolved, he took up quarrels with the world and modernity. From this sprang prose and, eventually, disciples both political and literary. The poetry of the old inner quarrel was never quite abandoned, though the font of inspiration ran close to dry. Instead, the poems were rewritten, ironed smooth, the self-division suppressed, chastened, or ironized. What remained was assured, refined, supple—but somehow confined. One thinks of Rilke’s panther in its cage.During Ransom’s lifetime, many thought that what he’d wrought in poetry was great, and numbered him among the storied names. Robert Lowell, speaking of the generation of American poets born in the 1870s and 80s, listed Frost, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliot, and Ransom as the masters, sure of lasting fame, adding only “who outranks whom will be disputed.” Randall Jarrell said Ransom’s poems would “outlive Mother Goose.” And at the height of his own fame Robert Frost told a fawning audience at Kenyon to redirect their enthusiasm, because the greatest living poet was their own Professor Ransom.From certain perspectives, Ransom’s legacy may count for more than that of more enduringly famous poets.
