Antique Harvester, Lovely Ritualist

...Only a small one gave she to her daddy Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby...

...now there are nine more plus the two revisions...

...Now, in honor of Ransom's 75th birthday, Knopf has published a revised and enlarged edition of Selected Poems (111 pp., $4.00...

...Minnit's House," "Inland City," or anything at all from his first book, Poems About God (1919...

...Ransom's themes are the great themes of poetry: love and death...

...Ransom finds the vanity of human aspiration neatly symbolized in the alternation of chills and fever, the title of his second book of verse...

...Ironically, his great prestige as a teacher, critic, and founding editor of the Kenyon Review has helped to obscure his stature as a poet...

...They include "Vision by Sweetwater," a magnificent creation and destruction of the innocence of childhood, and "Hilda," in which the bereft poet would follow Hilda's ghost: "But what I wear is flesh: it weighs like stone...

...It seems old-fashioned in its tone of ironic detachment, so much so that a reviewer welcomed Ransom in 1920 as "an American Georgian...

...in its poignant understatement seeing the dead child as wrapped in a "brown study...

...The finest of all of Ransom's poems, "The Equilibrists," treats the same subject with even greater richness, seeing unconsummating lovers as orbiting in an equilibrium, held in orbit by the equal pulls of honor and lust...

...Together with "spilled" and "stone," it pleads the terrible precariousness and vulnerability of human life...

...A number of Ransom's poems concern themselves with knightly combat, an amusing metaphor for the intellectual jousting of literary life...

...A good example here, in its off-rhyme and eccentric-cam metrics, is a stanza from the beautiful "Janet Waking": One kiss she gave her mother...

...Ransom still has not relented to the point of including such fine poems as "Miss Euphemia," "In Mr...

...actually it is deeply compassionate in its irony...

...No kiss at all for her brother...

...Antique Harvesters" harvests history in what appears to be a corner of Kentucky, with everything so numinous that even the fox pursued by spectral hunters becomes a "lovely ritualist...

...The "little" for the knight's groin, associating it with the horse's brain, at first seems cold...

...I am surprised," he said...

...Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss, The pieces kiss again, no end to this...

...Here Lies a Lady" is about a highborn lady's death "After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning...

...Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones...

...My stuff came out of the academy, I am sure that is apparent...

...I know now that when I was writing it I had no sound education in poetry, and was in torture trying to escape from the stilted and sentimental verbal habits which conditioned me...

...These nine poems are not as good as Ransom's best, but anyone else would be proud of them...

...It enables us to refute in detail Ransom's fantastic self-estimate...

...Hilda...

...A second quality that has limited Ransom's audience, but that like his tone of ironic detachment is an important factor in his excellence, is the quality that F. R. Higgins called, in reference to W. B. Yeats, verse "tuned, as it were, slightly off the note...

...Note the pun of "tinder" and "tender," the double meanings of "sublimed" and "infatuate," the powerful internal rhyme of "rend" and "end...

...Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter...

...Many of Ransom's best poems are written at the point of tension between life and death: "Dead Boy," a lament for "the old tree's late branch wrenched away...

...Painted Head" starts as a description of a portrait and in the course of nine quatrains manages to create an esthetics, a metaphysics, and an ethics...

...Parting, without a Sequel" shows us a girl who has permanently dismissed her lover: "And all the time she stood there hot as fever/And cold as any icicle...

...Thus the bulk of his work was written in a single marvelous decade from 1916 to 1926...

...WRITERS & WRITING Antique Harvester, Lovely Ritualist By Stanley Edgar Hyman IN 1950, when he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in poetry, John Crowe Ransom was asked for comment by a Times reporter...

...With the possible exception of 76-year-old Marianne Moore, Ransom is the finest poet in the United States today...

...He makes mocking use of such archaic and scholarly words as "ogive" (pointed arch), "thole" (endure), "pernoctated" (passed the night), and "diuturnity" (something lasting...

...Armageddon" is an amazing account of the final battle between Christ and Antichrist, seen as an odd kind of chivalric ballet...

...A stanza from "Necrological," a poem about a medieval friar's visit to a battlefield, provides an example: Close by the sable stream that purged the plain Lay the white stallion and his rider thrown, The great beast had spilled there his little brain, And the little groin of the knight was spilled by a stone...

...Other factors that have kept Ransom's poetry from the widest recognition are intrinsic to the verse itself...

...Ransom's other great theme is the tension of ungratified sexuality...

...More important, perhaps, has been Ransom's limited and brief output...

...There is nothing recent of mine for the committee to have considered, and my old work is small in volume when the inferior things are screened out...

...And would not be instructed in how deep Was the forgetful kingdom of death...

...The total volume of my verse is not very large," he observes ruefully in the preface to Selected Poems...

...Judith of Bethulia" ends with Judith triumphant after she has killed Holofernes, as a result of which "a madness fever our young men," and the poet asks, "Inflamed by the thought of her naked beauty with desire?/Yes, and chilled with fear and despair...

...Necrological...

...The two revised poems in the book, "Master's in the Garden Again" and "Prelude to an Evening," show that after more than 20 years of poetic inactivity, Ransom has lost little of his mastery...

...The book includes 53 poems, averaging one a year for Ransom's adult life...

...the five later ones were published before 1945...

...Blue Girls," which threatens the young and beautiful with a terrible vision of old age and "Blear eyes fallen from blue...

...This is as misleading as the Bollingen statement...

...and the modest and engaging commentary on the latter poem shows how effectively his fine critical intelligence serves his creative imagination...

...Other factors are his extraordinary modesty, typified by his reaction to the Bollingen Prize, and his fastidious refusal to engage in any form of self-promotion...

...His mastery is unmistakable from the first stanza of the first poem in the book, "Winter Remembered," the earliest work included: 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...

...In Poems and Essays in 1955, Ransom weakened to the extent of including two more from the earlier volumes...

...As a poet, Ransom remains an original...

...For the new volume Ransom has extensively rewritten two of the earlier poems, one with a commentary explaining and justifying the revisions...

...One can see other poems from which Robert Graves has learned, or Robert Lowell, or Howard Nemerov...

...The reasons for Ransom's comparative lack of fame as a poet are many...

...domestic and homely things," Ransom writes in the commentary on his revision in Selected Poems...

...His poetry is quite the reverse of unsound, tortured, stilted, sentimental or academic...

...Beneath his familiar and familial subjects...

...Ransom judges himself by the highest standard conceivable...

...The 1945 Selected Poems includes only 42 poems, less than half of those in the two volumes drawn on...

...The poem is too long to quote entire, but I must quote the stanzas in which honor and lust are translated into otherwordly alternatives: In Heaven you have heard no marriage is, No white flesh tinder to your lecheries, Your male and female tissue sweetly shaped Sublimed away, and furious blood escaped...

...But in a deeper sense John Crowe Ransom's poetry seems to be without ancestry and descendants, to spring up timeless and beautiful like Indian pipes in deep woods, to delight our minds and refresh our hearts...

...Other poems are as far from the domestic and the homely as one can get...

...But its true subject is mortality, and the tragic discovery of mortality...

...Probably the most of my poems are about familiar and familial situations...

...All but five were published many years ago, in Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927...

...Janet Waking" is ostensibly domestic and homely, about the death of a child's pet hen...

...One can see the faint influence of John Skelton in such a poem as "Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom," of John Donne in "The Equilibrists," of Thomas Hardy in "Puncture" and "Master's in the Garden Again" (the latter dedicated to him), of Wallace Stevens in "Prometheus in Straits" and "Prelude to an Evening...

...This is the subject of "Spectral Lovers," where the girl's unexpressed willingness and the man's scruples turn them into spectral lovers, their unconsummated love "a bird/Whose songs shall never be heard...

...and "Janet Waking," with its magnificent conclusion: And weeping fast as she had breath Janet implored us, "Wake her from her sleep...