Quotes from John Crowe Ransom

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

And if no Lethe flows beneath your casement, And when ten years have not brought full effacement, Philosophy was wrong, and you may meet.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels.

Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.

For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

Or he can work it out as a metrical and formal exercise, but he will be disappointed in its content. The New Year's prospect fairly chills his daunting breast.

It is a miracle of harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things.

The lazy geese, like a snow cloudDripping their snow on the green grass,Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,Who cried in goose, Alas.

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,The delight of her husband, her aunts, an infant of three,And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills.

Two evils, monstrous either one apart,Possessed me, and were long and loath at going:A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

Captain Carpenter rose up in his primePut on his pistols and went riding out.

God have mercy on the sinnerWho must write with no dinner,No gravy and no grub,No pewter and no pub,No belly and no bowels,Only consonants and vowels.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones; Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss, The pieces kiss again, no end to this.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

Would you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell? Or take your bodies honorless to Hell? In Heaven you have heard no marriage is, No white flesh tinder to your lecheries

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.

Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.

Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime Put on his pistols and went riding out But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.