John Crowe Ransom Quotes & Sayings

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. — John Crowe Ransom

Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet. — John Crowe Ransom

The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The imageis in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it. — John Crowe Ransom

I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack. — John Crowe Ransom

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

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. — John Crowe Ransom

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. — John Crowe Ransom

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined. — John Crowe Ransom

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. — John Crowe Ransom

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

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. — John Crowe Ransom

Tell this to ladies: how a hero man
Assail a thick and scandalous giant
Who casts true shadow in the sun,
And die, but play no truant.

This is more horrible: that the darling egg
Of the chosen people hatch a creature
Of noblest mind and powerful leg
Who cannot fathom nor perform his nature. — John Crowe Ransom

I am a lady young in beauty waiting
Until my truelove comes, and then we kiss. — John Crowe Ransom

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history. — John Crowe Ransom

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 — John Crowe Ransom

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape? — John Crowe Ransom

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. — John Crowe Ransom

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. — John Crowe Ransom

But we moderns are impatient and destructive. — John Crowe Ransom

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

And a wandering beauty is a blade out of its scabbard.You know how dangerous, gentlemen of threescore?May you know it yet ten more. — John Crowe Ransom

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. — John Crowe Ransom

It is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward. About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living. — John Crowe Ransom

In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roastbeef and potato.

A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle. — 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. — John Crowe Ransom

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. — John Crowe Ransom

Do not enforce the tired wolf
Dragging his infected wound homeward
To sit tonight with the warm children
Naming the pretty kings of France. — John Crowe Ransom