Life & Wisdom Quote by John C. Ransom

Ransom’s sentence is a velvet-gloved warning: polish your prose all you like, but don’t expect it to land as art. The phrasing turns on a sly bait-and-switch. “Sense and style” sounds like the wholesome promise of craft, a path toward “distinguished modern prose.” Then comes the trapdoor: if you succeed on those terms, “the result will not fall into any objective form.” Ransom isn’t merely skeptical of modern writing; he’s diagnosing a modern aesthetic that confuses refinement with finishedness.

The key word is “objective,” carrying the New Critical anxiety that literature ought to be a made thing - structured, coherent, formally accountable - not just an intelligent voice performing itself. “Fall into” makes form feel like gravity, something a work should naturally settle into when it’s truly achieved. Modern prose, in Ransom’s telling, hovers instead: elegant, perceptive, even “distinguished,” yet allergic to the hard commitments that turn language into a shaped object.

Subtext: he’s picking a fight with the prestige of the “modern.” He grants its virtues (clarity, sophistication, tonal control) precisely to argue that those virtues can become evasions. The sentence reads like a critic watching a writer substitute sensibility for architecture - the essayistic drift, the cultivated fragment, the pose of intelligence that never has to risk closure.

Contextually, this sits comfortably within Ransom’s broader project: defending form as a discipline against an increasingly self-conscious, personality-forward prose culture. It’s less nostalgia than a pointed question: when style becomes the point, what, exactly, gets made?