Life & Wisdom Quote by John C. Ransom

Language is supposed to be arbitrary: a clunky tool kit of agreed-upon noises pointing at meaning. Ransom starts there on purpose, then swerves into the “miraculous” with a sly seriousness that tells you what kind of writer he is: a critic-poet defending form at a moment when many moderns were eager to treat it as decoration or, worse, as a lie.

The sentence stages a tension between accident and design. In ordinary speech, sound is incidental; we tolerate homophones, ugly cadences, the flatness of prose because we’re chasing information. Poetry, for Ransom, is the scandalous exception: it asks words to do two jobs at once, to mean and to sing, to be intelligible while also locking into “objective structure” like a built thing. That phrase matters. “Objective” pushes back against the idea that a poem’s effects are merely private mood or subjective gush. Accents and rhymes are external constraints, measurable, almost architectural.

Calling it “miraculous, to the mystic” is Ransom’s wink and his argument. He doesn’t need literal mysticism; he wants the posture of awe. The subtext is polemical: if the harmony of sense and sound feels like a miracle, then free verse and anti-form experiments risk giving up the very drama that makes poetry more than heightened talk. Contextually, this is New Criticism’s weather system: suspicion of paraphrase, faith in the poem as an artifact, and a conviction that meaning is intensified, not obscured, when it’s forced through pattern. In Ransom’s hands, craft isn’t prudish constraint; it’s the improbable moment when accident starts to look like fate.