436 Making It New: 1900–1945he refers in his essays to that “irony” which, by combining the dream of the ideal
with the dismay of the actual, becomes “the rarest of the states of mind, because ...
the most inclusive,” he is implicitly describing the strategy of his own work. In such
lines, in fact, the poet himself seems to step forward, to establish the kind of “mellow
wisdom” (to use Ransom’s own phrase) of which the narrator-lover himself is
incapable: the ironic inclusiveness of vision that somehow eludes most people in
an untraditional world.
Not that it is always left to the style to perform this positive function in Ransom’s
poetry: just occasionally he is more explicit. This is the case with one of the few
poems where he is directly concerned with the Southern tradition, “Antique
Harvesters.” Set on the banks of the Mississippi, the poem presents Ransom’s native
region as a place where wholeness of being is still available. This is not because the
poet indulges in that easy nostalgia that the Fugitives criticized. On the contrary, it
is because he invites us into the mythmaking process. He observes the river, the land,
the harvesters, the old men who watch them, and “the hunters, keepers of a rite” who
ride by. And, as he does so, he gradually and consciously associates all these things
with the notions of ceremony and chivalry, the belief in a usable past and an
inheritable pattern of living. What seemed at first little more than “A meager hill of
kernels, a runnel of juice” is transformed during the course of the poem into a
spiritual resource, a setting that evidently furnishes roots and identity; and that
process of transformation, whereby an anonymous and apparently unpromising
environment becomes a heroic land, is as much a matter for the reader’s attention
as the purported subject is. The earth becomes “our Lady”; the hunters become
“archetypes of chivalry,” the hunted fox a “lovely ritualist”; the harvesters become
antique harvesters, participating in time-honored ceremonies and expressing
through their work a religious devotion to the land. Yet all this is done without any
rejecting or minimizing of the original facts in the case of the farm laborer, or in the
case of any person destined to work and then die. “Antique Harvesters” is, in fact,
not so much a portrait from life as a minor historical myth in which the process
of creation, the act of making a landscape and then attaching to it the idea of unity of
consciousness is the intent of the poem – and constitutes a vital part of its content too.
In some ways, Allen Tate (1889–1979) bears a haunting resemblance to Ransom.
He was similarly preoccupied with the radical discontinuities of modern existence;
and he also longed for a traditional society in which moral unity was the norm.
But there were profound differences too. The volume of Ransom’s creative work is
relatively small; after 1927, he committed only four new poems to print, concentrating
instead on public affairs and aesthetics and founding and editing the Kenyon Review.
Apart from a year in England as a Rhodes scholar in 1913, he spent his life in America,
teaching first at Vanderbilt and then at Kenyon College, Ohio. And the whole tone
and texture of his poetry was highly wrought but resistant to the specific forms of
experiment associated with modernism. Tate, on the other hand, was prolific. From
The Golden Mean and Other Poems (1928) to The Swimmers (1971) he produced a
steady stream of verse over six decades, brought together in Collected Poems (1977).
He wrote interpretive biographies of Stonewall Jackson (1928) and Jefferson DavisGGray_c04.indd 436ray_c 04 .indd 436 8 8/1/2011 7:53:58 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 58 AM