Life & Wisdom Quote by John C. Ransom

Ransom’s line is a dry little grenade lobbed into the pieties of “serious” writing. The mock-bureaucratic phrasing - “privileged,” “certain proportion,” “sober documents,” capped with the absurdly precise “one-half of one per cent” - treats poetry as if it were a regulated industry allowed a tiny legal allowance of impurities. That deadpan accounting joke is the point: he’s exposing how modern culture tries to domesticate art by measuring it with the tools of administration, scholarship, and professionalism.

The specific intent is double-edged. On one side, Ransom defends poetry’s right to be irrational, excessive, even “nonsense” - not as a flaw, but as one of its working materials. On the other, he needles poets themselves: the indulgence can become a habit, a smug exemption from clarity, a way to launder laziness as lyric mystery. Calling poems “documents” slyly suggests they still carry responsibility; the “nonsense” is permitted, not unlimited.

Context matters. Ransom, a major figure in the New Criticism orbit, wrote during a period when poetry was being pulled between modernist experimentation and a growing academic apparatus that wanted poems to behave: to be teachable, categorizable, respectable. His joke performs what it argues. By parodying the language of institutional oversight, he shows how ridiculous it is to demand that poetry justify its wildness in the same register as a ledger. The subtext: art survives by refusing the full audit.