John Crowe Ransom, RIP

He had a cool, subtle, astringent mind, as cautious of enthusiasm as an Augustan moralist’s. “Shakespeare,” he once wrote, “could put a character into a situation that called for a desperate speech, and give him one. But he could not seat this character at the table to compose a finished poem, and then let him stand up and deliver it.” By “a finished poem” he meant something that held together like an icosahedron, point tightly sustaining point and the whole symmetrical. By “a desperate speech” he meant a streaming by of effects, in which the audience collaborates by asking no questions.

And he was born to a world that is run by the equivalent of desperate speeches, a world in which there are questions we do not ask. All its doings, its cities and its commerce and its travel, are modes of desperate unquestioned oratory; so are the gestures of its refusers.

HK

About the Author

Hugh Kenner

He had a cool, subtle, astringent mind, as cautious of enthusiasm as an Augustan moralist’s. “Shakespeare,” he once wrote, “could put a character into a situation that called for a desperate speech, and give him one. But he could not seat this character at the table to compose a finished poem, and then let him stand up and deliver it.” By “a finished poem” he meant something that held together like an icosahedron, point tightly sustaining point and the whole symmetrical. By “a desperate speech” he meant a streaming by of effects, in which the audience collaborates by asking no questions.

And he was born to a world that is run by the equivalent of desperate speeches, a world in which there are questions we do not ask. All its doings, its cities and its commerce and its travel, are modes of desperate unquestioned oratory; so are the gestures of its refusers.