Life & Wisdom Quote by John C. Ransom

Modernism arrives here less like an art movement than a tax bill: unavoidable, resented, and already overdue. John Crowe Ransom’s line works because it frames poetry’s situation as a matter of institutional pressure, not aesthetic adventure. “The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism” implies a reluctant capitulation across painting, music, architecture - everyone has been forced to deal with the new regime. Then comes the tart little tag: “how should poetry escape?” It’s a rhetorical question that doesn’t seek an answer; it closes the door on nostalgia.

Ransom, a poet-critic associated with the Southern Agrarians and later the New Critics, is speaking from a moment when Modernism had become both a challenge and a standard. By the time the avant-garde turns canonical, “recognize” becomes a telling verb: not “embrace” or “love,” but acknowledge. The subtext is double-edged. On one side, he concedes Modernism’s sweep - the fragmentation, irony, difficulty, the hard turn away from Victorian sentiment. On the other, he hints at poetry’s peculiar vulnerability: language is the most tradition-laden medium, and the easiest to police with inherited expectations about “sense,” “music,” and moral tone.

The sentence also smuggles in a warning about provincial exceptionalism. Poetry can’t pretend it’s a protected species, exempt from the shock of industrial modernity and cultural dislocation that Modernism metabolizes. If it tries to “escape,” it doesn’t stay pure; it becomes irrelevant. Ransom’s clipped pragmatism is its own modern gesture: the old world may be preferred, but the present is still the weather.