"And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious"
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Poetry, in Ransom's framing, is less a timeless art than a suddenly exposed institution, wobbling on a modern fault line. "Stand up" turns the genre into a body expected to keep its balance under pressure; "new conditions" are the unseen hands changing the floor beneath it. The punch is in the chilly certainty of "perfectly precarious": not just threatened, but threatened in a way that feels structurally inevitable.
Ransom, a poet-critic tied to the Southern Agrarians and later the New Critics, was writing from a moment when poetry's old social habitat was collapsing. Mass literacy did not automatically mean mass readership for poems. Journalism, advertising, radio, and the factory tempo of modern life reorganized attention into faster, louder units. The academy was becoming a refuge, but also a kind of quarantine: poetry could survive as a subject even while losing ground as a shared public language. His worry isn't only economic or demographic; it's about authority. If modernity trains people to trust the measurable, the immediate, the practical, then poetry's claims-to ambiguity, to tone, to thickened language-start to look like indulgences.
The subtext is a critic's double-bind. Ransom is partly mourning, partly clearing space for a new justification: if poetry's position is precarious, it must sharpen its rationale, defend its methods, professionalize its reading. That precariousness becomes an argument for criticism itself-for a class of interpreters who can explain why a poem matters when the culture no longer automatically agrees that it does.
Ransom, a poet-critic tied to the Southern Agrarians and later the New Critics, was writing from a moment when poetry's old social habitat was collapsing. Mass literacy did not automatically mean mass readership for poems. Journalism, advertising, radio, and the factory tempo of modern life reorganized attention into faster, louder units. The academy was becoming a refuge, but also a kind of quarantine: poetry could survive as a subject even while losing ground as a shared public language. His worry isn't only economic or demographic; it's about authority. If modernity trains people to trust the measurable, the immediate, the practical, then poetry's claims-to ambiguity, to tone, to thickened language-start to look like indulgences.
The subtext is a critic's double-bind. Ransom is partly mourning, partly clearing space for a new justification: if poetry's position is precarious, it must sharpen its rationale, defend its methods, professionalize its reading. That precariousness becomes an argument for criticism itself-for a class of interpreters who can explain why a poem matters when the culture no longer automatically agrees that it does.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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