Far away time
ASHLEY BROWN
Selected Poems John Crowe Ransom (Eyre and Spottiswoode 40s) This third edition of Mr Ransom's Selected Poems is presumably the final version that
he will publish. In 1945 he brought out his first Selected Poems, which was too modest a collection to satisfy his admirers, but it was not till 1963 that he reissued it in an enlarged edition. (This second one was not published in England.) At least two poems were recast in a most drastic way, so much so as to be new poems. Now we have a still larger selection and further revisions. The final section Of the book is a rather novel arrangement: eight 'pairings' of orig, inal texts of poems followed by their latest revisions and accompanied by prose com, mentaries in which the poet explains why he was led to make his changes. Some day we shall no doubt have a Variorum Ransom which studies these matters in detail (and which makes all his poems i'vailable), but for the time being we should be grateful to have so many of them together.
This is not the place to argue the merits of Mr Ransom's revisions, which not every- one will like. But how many poets would allow us to choose our own versions, early or late? There is something ingratiating about the way in which he now takes us into his confidence and talks about the very human subjects of these poems, because this most courtly of modern poets is deeply concerned with the passions and despairs that lie beneath the forms of civilised be- haviour. Incidentally, two curious editorial errors appear in this edition. 'Here Lies a Lady' was first published. in Chills and Fever (1924) not in Poemi and Essays, a 1955 paperback (which Mr Ransom dates 1945). It is the 1955 revised version he prints here as the 'old' one. Likewise 'Of Margaret' was first published under a slightly different title in 1934. The 'old' version here dates from 1945, when it was already revised somewhat. So much for scholarly quibbles.
Mr Ransom is very much a poet of the 1920s; his great creative period lasted from 1922 to 1927, and after that he wrote scarcely a handful of poems. How unlike his exact contemporary T. S. Eliot he seems. He had the same classical education at Vanderbilt that Eliot had at Harvard, but Eliot spent a post-graduate year (1910-11) in the Paris of Apollinaire while Mr Ran- som was at Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar). Perhaps the contrast is already clear. Eliot joined forces with Pound and Joyce (most prominently) to create 'modernism' in our literature. Mr Ransom chose otherwise. He and Frost and Graves (to mention the most obvious names) shunned the metropolitan centres where modernism flourished. Their kind of modern tradition (what should one call it?) has not been spectacular like The Waste Land and The Cantos, but it re- presents a considerable achievement.
There is the special matter of Mr Ran- som's 'Southern' qualities. At the time when he began to write his best poems, after the First World War, he could not have found any Southern poet whom he could use as a model (Eliot had made the same complaint about Boston a decade earlier). The problem, for a man like Mr Ransom who intended to locate himself in his native milieu, was how to use the manner and speech of his people without succumbing to the easy 'local colour' that limited so many regional writers, Southern and other- wise. His real master was Hardy (who was still active in England), but he seems to have discovered Donne at least as early as Eliot. His famous irony certainly comes out in his 'metaphysical' conceits: `Dear love, these fingers that had known your touch, And tied our separate forces first together, Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much, Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.'
The 'metaphysical' devices, however, scarcely account for the unique tone of these poems.
Many of them partake of the old- fashioned oratory of his region (Mr Ran- som's father was a Methodist preacher). In a sense the South was organised by the public voices of the preacher and the politician, and in these poems one can catch a kind of distillation of the old manner: `But now go the bells, and we are ready,' or, 'Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;' or 'Therefore let us assemble, dry, grey, spare,/And mild as yellow air.'
Some of the poems are intimate and domestic, like 'Janet Waking' (my little backyard poem,' he once called it), but they are often varied by a hint of the mock- heroic. 'Captain Carpenter' is superb mock- heroic. His way of being modern, in fact, is to complicate the tone—something the `local colour' artist can never achieve. `Old Mansion', which looks very Southern in- deed, is cunningly transmuted from a few pages in Henry James's The American Scene and comes out as a little interior drama. In the end one finds that these poems do not respond easily to analy- sis—unlike the 'metaphysical' poems of Empson.
It is presumptuous, perhaps, to suggest that a poetry of this sort could not be re- peated. These poems seem to have been written at a moment when Mr Ransom, so finely attuned to the manners and speech of his community, struck a certain balance with history. Much was rapidly passing out of his world; some things deserved to
pass.- To distinguish the authentic from the sentimental and corrupt, without being harshly abrasive, called for a rare order of mind and a special kind of manners. The world of the 'Old Mansion' could no longer easily act as an affront to the 'unseemlier world' of the present. Possibly with some such awareness of the situation Mr Ransom extended the range of his style in the later poems; he reworked Hopkins in one in- stance and began to sound like Stevens in another ('Painted Head'). But the historical moment had gone; the subject was used up. Now we have the poems again; they look better than ever, as indeed they should. Few poets are such a pleasure to read, and it is good to be reminded, so courteously, 'Of that far away time of gentleness.'
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