Biography

You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Criticism: John Crowe Ransom

by Gary Lehmann

I've been writing literary critiques of poems and poets for the past decade and more. I've always found that the poem and the poet bear a cordial relationship to one another. Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm, as my old grandmother used to say. Whenever I find something puzzling in the poem, I find the answer in the life or times of the poet. But always at my back I hear the rumblings of a contrarian philosophy that intones that poems should be read for what they say, not what they say about the poet or his times. The text is its only spokesperson and the only one we should attend.

This so-called New Criticism was the dominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century, especially between 1920 and 1960. Under the banner of New Criticism, poets and critics such as John Crowe Ransom and his students Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Allen Tate have expounded in great detail the idea that if you want to understand a poem you have to read the text. Read it very carefully. Read it and only it. The text is the thing to tell the conscience of the poet, not his upbringing, or his tragic life, or anything other than the words of the poem itself. They reject utterly my method of reading the whole poem, plus the whole life of the poet, plus the whole history of the times in which the poem was written.

According to them, the poem is given birth by the author and then it belongs to the public. Once the poet is done with it, the poem wanders off into the world of poetry to make its own way, like a teenager who has run away from home. New Critics say it is false to assume that poets and their poems are at all related.

Personally, I have no problem with the positive statement that the words are important in determining the meaning of the words, but I object most vigorously to the negative proposition that you can’t tell anything about a poem from the poet or the times in which the poem was written.

Let’s put the theory to a test. I propose to take John Crowe Ransom’s best poem, "Blue Girls," to see what, if anything, we can find in the poem that cannot be found in the words. Here’s the poem:

Twirling your blue skirts, traveling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.

Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.

Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.

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—yet it is not long
Since she was livelier than any of you.

Why do these girls wear blue skirts? If we rely on the words of the poem alone, we'd have to conclude the girls attended a seminary school perhaps in preparation for a life in a religious order. If we allow ourselves to go outside the poem, we might acknowledge that blue skirts are frequently wore by girls in Catholic or private schools. Privileged girls who are getting a good education away from the public system might be said to have different problems from girls forced to take what education society chooses to give them. The tone of this poem is different if the girls are in a religious order or in a privileged environment where a bright secular future awaits them.

This poem was first published in 1924. So, Ransom can be excused for the slightly patronizing tone of the narrator in the poem. The poet sings the praises of the beauty of the girls, and they must make the best of their beauty while it lasts for there are plenty of old crones about to prove that beauty fades all too fast. The poem does not contemplate the possibility that these pretty girls might someday become future business leaders, politicians, or research doctors. It sees them in a very traditional role.

If we want to understand this aspect of the poem a little more, it might be helpful to realize that John Crowe Ransom was the leader of a group called the Fugitives. To do this, of course, we have to go outside the words of the poem itself. The Fugitives was a group of poets mostly from Vanderbilt University who saw the encroachment of industrialization on the South as basically dehumanizing, an imposition involving more losses than gains. It was a conservative movement in literature which viewed the South and the role of women in the South conservatively and nostalgically. Does that help us understand the patronizing tone of Blue Girls? I think it does.

If we go outside the words of the poem once again, we might become aware of the oblique reference to Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time,”

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

But you wouldn't know this if you stick strictly to the text. Does the allusion connect this poem to a whole tradition of love poetry? Does that knowledge enhance your appreciation of what Ransom is trying to do here? Of course it does. It would be foolish to say otherwise.

Ramsom and the other New Critics admonish us to avoid summarizing the poem as if it were a secret message scribbled inside a bottle. But the fact that beauty is fading and must be appreciated while it lasts is a well-recognized adage in life and helps us see the poem as part of a long-lasting human understanding. Why deny yourself access to this aspect of the poem? The words are still there to appreciate.

Blue Girls contains some unusual words. Sward is a grassy surface. Fillets are hair ribbons, and blear eyes are sore and runny, but then you’d only know that if you went outside the poem and looked it up somewhere. How many normal readers are versed in the vocabulary of 14th century Old High German?

John Crowe Ransom has written a fine poem here, but it is not a poem that is totally self-explanatory without reference to cultural and literary resources which reside outside the text itself. The notion so prized by New Critics that we should read the words of the poem carefully is admirable, but myopic. Poets live in a cultural environment and poems have to be understood as part of the flow of a greater culture. To limit your reading of a poem to the words and only the words is to see the tree while ignoring the forest, the sky, the wind, the water, the shadows around the tree, to say nothing of Al Gore. Why deny yourself the whole picture?

I’m willing to agree that the words are primary, but I stop short of the assertion that anything outside the words is misleading and worthless.