The poetry of John Crowe Ransom : women as metaphysical symbols

The purpose of this study is to investigate John Crowe Ransom's use of women as metaphysical symbols in his poetry, revealing the relationship between the poetry and the critical, social, and, ultimately, philosophical theories he proposed. For too long the divergent facets of his career have been dealt with in isolation: he is often labeled "Fugitive," "Agrarian," "New Critic," or, worst yet, "regional" Southern poet. Actually, a synthesis of all of Ransom's ideas is effected in his poetry. The dramatic mode of the majority of his poems lends itself to analysis of his characters as evidence of this fusion. Specifically, the male/female polarity represents the crux of Ransom's dualistic world view. The poem itself, as the supreme form of art, reconciles the two.

The introductory chapter comments on Ransom's views of philosophy, religion, poetry, and criticism, concentrating on a germinal philosophic discourse that influenced the direction of his ideas in the Agrarian and New Criticism movements. This essay, "The Third Moment," explains the symbolic relationship between his characters in virtually every poem.

Following the philosophical progression of this essay, the second chapter deals specifically with the initial phase of experience, the "First Moment": absolute innocence and unity, untainted by abstraction. Only females exist in this realm. Ransom's poems celebrate the young girl oblivious to transience and unaware of her sentience, her fusion with a reality that males can only envy.

The next chapter traces the progress of that child as she moves, inevitably, into the sterile world of Ransom's maiden ladies. Perfection and oneness with reality, it seems, cannot sustain them-selves against the onslaught of abstraction. Lacking the ability to conceptualize, Ransom's old maids suffer blindly, understanding neither themselves nor their alien worlds. They either become embittered or turn temptress, thus avoiding or invading a hostile male world.

The last chapter deals with those poems which have both males and females present. Women are no longer center stage. Instead, the paradox of the thinking male, who recognizes his separation from reality (Ransom's "Second Moment") but--because of thinking rather than feeling--cannot heal the breach (Ransom's "Third Moment"), becomes the central issue of the poems. Women, here, merely heighten the tragic dilemma of men. Thus, in his poems the full expression of Ransom's philosophy is achieved.

An examination of the roles women play in Ransom's poetry reveals, then, the central dissociation thesis of all of Ransom's theories: the unknowableness of ultimate reality. Ransom's well-documented irony centers on the human condition that women perceive but do not conceive (even literally); while women are thus unable to enjoy their unity of being, men's conceptions merely lead them to futile observation of women's perceptions, their oneness with reality.