Modern Poets

THE WORLD'S BODY--John Crowe Ransom--Scribner ($2.75).

There is no primer of modern poetry. Readers who are intimidated by its obscurity soon find that most prose explanations tend to become almost as obscure as the poems, and generally duller. And they usually conclude, sometimes with a feeling that they may be missing something, but more often with a conviction that they are not, that contemporary poetry is a doubtful contribution to the world they know. John Crowe Ransom's The World's Body is not a primer of poetry, but it contains one of the clearest explanations of the obscurity of contemporary verse which has been written, along with discussions that will whet a reader's appetite for poetry as much as mere prose can.

The work of a slight, courtly, 50-year-old professor of English at Kenyon College, The World's Body is a collection of 15 essays ranging from discussion of the form of Milton's Lycidas to a review of a novel by Rebecca West. It includes a highly civilized polishing off of Philosopher George Santayana, a neat dismemberment of T. S. Eliot for Murder in the Cathedral, similarly effective attacks on Edna St. Vincent Millay and Critic I. A. Richards. A polite executioner, Professor Ransom never fails to call attention to the courage of his victims, to the elegance of their dress and manners; and he is willing to let the final blow fall gently, so long as he knows that it is final.

Professor Ransom does not so much defend the obscurity of modern poets as give a lucid explanation of its cause. He says that poets, once bards, patriots and men of public importance, now seem wilfully determined to destroy the prestige that their predecessors have courted for generations. If they write "pure" poetry, like Wallace Stevens, their poems have no moral, political, religious, or sociological values, and their technical dexterity is spent on subjects that have no importance. If they write "obscure" poetry, like Allen Tate, their subjects are important, but they deliberately complicate their lines as if afraid of being caught moralizing. But their logic is valid, and powerful inhibitions force them to write as they do, or to destroy the poems they sometimes write that echo an earlier period. They are specialized, but so is every other department of the modern world. Technically, the best of them are capable of writing grand, ruminating lines like Byron's

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean,

roll!

But just as archaic diction seems false, so does archaic temper, and living poets' art must be as "contemporaneous as our banking or our locomotion." In the modern world people seek "isolated perfections" in the different realms of human life, poets no less than others. Professor Ransom deplores this, because it makes the beauty of "pure" poetry cloistered and the beauty of "obscure" poetry teasing and evasive. As a means of bringing poetry back to the position it once held, he suggests that writers study those elements in human experience that cannot be dissociated. But, he says, he makes the suggestion diffidently and without much hope.

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