John Crowe Ransom
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.Collection: Poetry
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?Collection: Poetry
And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.
Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.
Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.
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.
It is a miracle of harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things.
But we moderns are impatient and destructive.
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.
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.
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
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.
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Fashion
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Gentleman
And if no Lethe flows beneath your casement, And when ten years have not brought full effacement, Philosophy was wrong, and you may meet.Collection: Philosophy