A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 435

Selected Poems (1945, 1963, 1969), attests. He is also among those most firmly

committed to the belief that only a traditional society, through its myths and

ceremonies, can promote human wholeness. Contemporary society, on the contrary,

the one Ransom saw all around him in America, left people divided, disassociated,

their personalities fragmented or underdeveloped. The desperation of many of

Ransom’s poetic characters springs from the fact that they cannot achieve unity

of being. They are like the narrator of “Winter Remembered” who, separated off

from his beloved, comes to typify the sense of fragmentation, estrangement, and

sheer vacuum which all those who have failed to attain wholeness of being must

experience. Lonely old spinsters (“Emily Hardcastle, Spinster”), young scholars

(“Persistent Explorer”), old eccentrics (“Captain Carpenter”), thwarted lovers

(“Parting at Dawn,” “The Equilibrists”), abstract idealists and optimists (“Man

Without Sense of Direction”) – they all illustrate that “old illusion of grandeur”

which Ransom explores in one of his later poems, “Painted Head” – the belief that

the mind can exist apart, “play truant from the body bush.” This, certainly, is one of

Ransom’s favorite themes: that “cry of Absence, Absence in the heart” which charts

out a more general situation of emptiness and loss. Others are death and the world

of the child, which are often treated together, as in “Dead Boy,” “Bells for

John Whiteside’s Daughter,” and “Blue Girls.” “Death is the greatest subject for

poetry,” Ransom insisted, “... there’s no recourse from death, except that we learn to

face it.” As such, it provides modern man in particular with a timely reminder of

his limitations: the most powerful example possible of all that the reason cannot

encompass or control. And when that subject is the death of a child then, for Ransom,

a further dimension is added because, in a fragmented society such as our own, only

the child’s world is whole. Only this world does not suffer from dissociation, Ransom

believed, and a consequent feeling of spiritual absence; and even so it presents a less

than satisfying possibility because – as the very facts of transience and mortality

indicate – it is innocent, limited, and frail.

Ransom’s aim is not simply to describe such characters and situations, however.

He tries to place them, most often with the help of a peculiar quality of language

and tone. “Winter Remembered,” for instance, ends with these lines:

Dear love, these fingers that had known your touch,

And tied our separate forces first together

Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much,

Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.

This mundane image, contrasting sharply with the romantic framework of the rest

of the poem, brings together the conflicting figures of heat and cold that characterize

the rest of the poem: the parsnips, normally capable of warmth and growth, have

been frozen into lifelessness just as, in a way, the narrator and his limbs have.

The peculiar tone or attitude engendered by this comparison is characteristic of

Ransom, and has been variously described as a kind of acid gaiety, a wrinkled

laughter, or detached wit. Perhaps the best description is Ransom’s own. For when

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