Life & Wisdom Quote by John C. Ransom

A small sentence with a big turf war inside it: Ransom turns the critic and the poet into rival job descriptions, then quietly suggests both are overreaching. The line works because it’s balanced like a courtroom scale - “demanded” versus “attempted” - and because both verbs imply strain. The critic doesn’t merely judge; he demands, as if the poem owes him clarity, coherence, a moral, a thesis, a set of deliverables. The poet doesn’t simply write; she attempts, as if art were a high-wire act undertaken with no guarantee of landing.

Ransom’s subtext is the central anxiety of early-to-mid 20th-century literary culture: criticism was professionalizing, becoming more methodical and more confident in its authority, while poetry was being asked to justify itself in an age of mass politics, mass media, and accelerating “usefulness.” As a leading figure in the New Criticism orbit, Ransom helped build a critical apparatus that treated poems as intricate objects worthy of close reading. Yet this line contains a self-check. It’s an admission that criticism can become a kind of bureaucratic appetite, expecting the poem to surrender its ambiguity on command.

The sting is in “too much.” Ransom isn’t absolving poets of ambition or critics of rigor; he’s warning what happens when interpretation starts acting like extraction. Art thrives on what resists paraphrase, while criticism often gets rewarded for turning that resistance into a clean account. The quote is a compact reminder that the critic’s hunger for certainty and the poet’s reach for the ineffable can end up colliding - and both can mistake that collision for progress.