17 John Crowe Ransom Quotes

John Crowe Ransom quotes

1. For I could tell you a story which is true; I know a lady with a terrible tongue, Blear eyes fallen from blue, All her perfections tarnished-and yet it is not long Since she was lovelier than any of you.

2. And weeping fast as she had breath Janet implored us, 'Wake her from her sleep!' And would not be instructed in how deep Was the forgetful kingdom of death.

3. 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.

4. Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree. Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills, The delight of her husbands, her aunts, an infant of three, And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills.

5. 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.

1. Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.

2. And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

3. Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime Put on his pistols and went riding out But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.

4. Do not enforce the tired wolf Dragging his infected wound homeward To sit tonight with the warm children Naming the pretty kings of France.

5. In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. It is a miracle of harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things.

9. And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

10. I would not knock old fellows in the dust But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back His weapons were the old heart in his bust And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.

11. 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.

12. 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.