John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974) was an influential American poet, essayist, and critic, best known as a leader of the Southern Agrarians and a key figure in the New Criticism movement. His work emphasized formalism, close reading, and the literary text's autonomy, thus supporting the school of New Criticism. Ransom's poetry is known for its wit, irony, and classical restraint. His first poetic collection, Poems About God, was published in 1919 and was admired by Robert Frost and Robert Graves.
In 1930, alongside eleven other Southern Agrarians, he published the conservative Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, a manifesto defending agrarian values against industrialism. He was a founding member of The Fugitives, a group of Southern poets who promoted traditionalism and regional identity. Other prominent members of The Fugitives included Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Donald Davidson. Later on, Allan Tate and Ransom also contributed to the movement of New Criticism.
His collection of essays, The New Criticism (1941), helped define the movement, which focused on analyzing texts as self-contained works rather than through historical or biographical context. He mentored other major critics like Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Ransom’s ideas shaped mid-20th-century literary criticism, and his poetry remains admired for its intellectual depth and formal precision.
His essay, A Note on Ontology (1934), is considered an important document that played a crucial role in his development of New Criticism and his theory of poetry. It is a foundational essay in 20th-century literary criticism, bridging modernist poetics, Southern Agrarian thought, and the emerging New Criticism. Ransom borrowed the term "ontology" (the study of being) from philosophy but applied it to poetry, asserting that a poem is not just a vehicle for meaning but an object with its own mode of existence. Unlike science or philosophy, which seek abstract truths, poetry preserves the "world's body"—the concrete, sensuous, and often contradictory nature of reality.
John Crowe Ransom's essay "A Note on Ontology" presents a fundamental argument about the nature of poetry, asserting its unique ontological status as an autonomous form of being. He categorizes poetry into three distinct types based on its relationship to objects and ideas.
Physical Poetry:
The first type, physical poetry, focuses exclusively on concrete objects and material reality, employing literal, scientific language that emphasizes surface appearances without engaging with deeper meaning. While this form maintains purity in its visual representation, Ransom finds it ultimately limited due to its lack of intellectual depth and inability to sustain reader interest. According to him, Physical poetry is pure poetry because it has a visual context. It is too realistic, and it does not maintain interest because it does not engage with meaning beyond the physical.
Platonic Poetry:
In contrast, Platonic poetry represents the opposite extreme, dealing primarily with abstract ideas, philosophical truths, and moral lessons rather than concrete reality. Ransom associates this form with much of Romantic and Victorian poetry, citing Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" as a prime example. He criticizes Platonic poetry for sacrificing sensory richness and imagery in favor of intellectual abstraction, resulting in work that becomes too idealistic and divorced from the tangible world. While these first two categories represent opposing approaches, Ransom ultimately rejects both as incomplete forms of poetic expression. He says that Platonic or Didactic poetry is too abstract; it sacrifices sensory richness for intellectualism, reducing poetry to mere ideology.
Metaphysical Poetry:
The third and most valued category in Ransom's taxonomy is metaphysical poetry, which synthesizes the strengths of both physical and Platonic poetry. This form achieves a sophisticated balance between reason and emotion, intellect and sensation, through the use of conceits - extended, often surprising metaphors that create tension between concrete images and abstract ideas. Ransom particularly admires seventeenth-century poets like John Donne and Abraham Cowley for their mastery of this approach, where physical objects become vehicles for complex philosophical and emotional exploration. Ransom termed metaphysical poetry as the Ideal Fusion that blends physical and platonic poetry, merging reason and emotion, intellect and sensation appropriately.
Ransom’s Theory of Criticism: Ontological Criticism versus Pure Speculation
Ransom extends his ontological analysis to literary criticism, rejecting traditional methods that rely on biographical, psychological, or moral frameworks. He dismisses these approaches as speculative and external to the text itself, arguing instead for what he terms ontological criticism. This method treats the poem as a self-sufficient entity with its own independent existence, focusing analysis on the interplay between two fundamental elements: structure (the paraphrasable core or logical framework of the poem) and texture (the aesthetic elements including meter, rhyme, and metaphor that resist paraphrase). For Ransom, true poetic excellence emerges from the inseparable fusion of these components. True poetry exists in the tension between structure and texture—neither pure abstraction nor mere description, but a fusion of thought and sensation. This makes poetry an autonomous art form, irreducible to paraphrase or external analysis.
Poetic vs. Scientific Discourse
The essay further distinguishes between poetic and scientific discourse, characterizing poetry as inherently democratic due to its openness to multiple interpretations. The presence of irony and ambiguity in poetry invites diverse readings, in contrast to scientific discourse, which demands singular, authoritative meanings.
Poetic discourse is democratic—open to multiple interpretations due to irony, ambiguity, and metaphor. Scientific discourse is authoritative—it demands a single, objective meaning.
Ransom concludes by emphasizing the need for innovative critical approaches that engage with the poem's unique ontological status rather than relying on conventional frameworks. In his view, great poetry exists as a complete artistic being where structure and texture merge inseparably, creating a rich, complex reality that transcends both pure abstraction and mere description. Ransom argues that good criticism must innovate, not just repeat conventions. A critic should engage with the poem’s unique form and being rather than imposing pre-existing frameworks.
Ransom’s ontology of poetry became central to New Criticism as he asserted the Autonomy of the Text; The poem is a self-sufficient object (not a biography or historical document). He emphasized on Close Reading; attention to form (meter, diction, ambiguity) reveals the poem’s unique being. Ransom was against utilitarianism and suggested that Poetry doesn’t "do" anything—it simply is. His essay offers a defense of the humanities. If science explains how things work, poetry reveals what it means to exist. His essay responds to the rise of positivism (the belief that only scientific knowledge is valid). His counter-argument is that Science abstracts, generalizes, and reduces reality to laws (e.g., physics reducing a rose to molecular structures). He says that Poetry resists this reductionism by preserving Particularity (the unique rose, not the category "rose"), Contradictions (love as both divine and grotesque in Donne), and Irrationality (the emotional, inexplicable aspects of life).
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