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  • Recovering John Crowe Ransom's Poems
  • John Burt

As a poet, John Crowe Ransom had both a very long career and a very short one. His first poems began to appear in 1916, and the last volume of his poetry in which he had an editorial hand appeared in 1969. During that period he published about one hundred and eighty poems. Ransom rethought these poems frequently over his career, with the magazine versions undergoing extensive rewriting before their first book publication, and the book versions themselves undergoing very significant revision (including addition or removal of extended passages, even changes in title and changes in point) in the different volumes of selected poetry he published in 1945, 1963, and 1969. The selected volumes show Ransom to be rigorously critical of his own works, excluding every poem from his 1919 first volume, Poems About God (except for "Overtures," which he included in his 1969 selection in order to compare it with a new, much-revised version), and including even in the largest version only about half of his published oeuvre.

Ransom's career as a writer of new poems, however, was very brief, for all practical purposes coming to an end with the publication of Two Gentlemen in Bonds in 1927, after which he completed only seven more poems. His career as an active poet was essentially over before he began thinking through the ideas that shaped the Agrarian movement, inaugurated by the 1930 collection I'll Take My Stand, which Ransom edited and wrote the opening manifesto for. Ransom had always thought seriously about poetry, about how to read it and how to teach it to students, but his career as a critic (and as the coiner of the term "New Criticism") also only took flight after his career as poet was over.

The conflict between these two time scales, between Ransom's brief but intense moment as a creator of poems and his extended period as a reviser of those poems, raises complex issues for his editors because his [End Page 91] alterations are considered by most readers to vary widely in quality. The revisions he prepared for his first Selected Poems volume in 1945, for instance, are usually taken (for instance by Randall Jarrell when he reviewed the book on its first appearance) to sharpen the precision and heighten the nuance of the poems, but many readers think of his revisions for his 1963 selection as uneven, and very few readers defend the revisions Ransom made for his final volume (Jarrell 378–90). About the latter, Allen Tate went so far as to refer to Ransom's "compulsive revisions" as "John's mania (I don't know what else to call it)" (Tate 549). Robert Lowell, no stranger himself to the habit of marring early poems with late second thoughts, referred to Ransom as "trying to perfect his old, almost perfect poems in a disastrously new style" (Lowell 20–28).

Ransom complicated this matter further by foregrounding these last and most controversial revisions, gathering them together in "Sixteen Poems in Eight Pairings," a section of his 1969 volume in which he sought to "see how a deficient poem may be whipped into something more satisfactory–if only it has sufficient 'makings'" (Crowder 354). Ransom provides an extensive account of why the new versions should be seen as superior to the originals, but most readers have been no more likely to prefer them than to prefer Wordsworth's 1850 version of The Prelude to the 1805 version. The unevenness of Ransom's rethinking of his poetry means that any perfectly consistent theory of what the copy-text should be for his collected poems would have to do a disservice to his oeuvre, by not consistently picking out the versions upon which his reputation hangs.

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Calls for a collected edition of Ransom's poems began almost upon the publication of his first selected volume in 1945. F. O. Matthiessen, for instance, looked for a collected volume to remedy what he thought were Ransom's too-strict omissions from his selection (Matthiessen decried the rejection of "Amphibious Crocodile" and "Agitato ma no troppo"). Randall Jarrell, although generally...

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