Life & Wisdom Quote by John C. Ransom

Ransom’s line is a little defensive, a little accusatory, and entirely strategic: it redraws the battlefield. If critics insist on judging poetry “on exactly the same grounds” as prose, he suggests, they aren’t just being strict; they’re committing a category error that turns review culture into a trap. The verb “pounce” casts criticism as predation, less careful reading than blood sport. And “the poets tremble” isn’t only about fragile egos. It’s about a system of evaluation that can discipline writers into sanding down what makes poetry poetry.

The specific intent is to protect poetic style from a dominant critical yardstick: clarity, paraphrasability, linear argument, the demand that language behave like a transparent pane. Ransom, a central figure in New Criticism, is often associated with close reading and rigor; the twist here is that rigor doesn’t mean importing prose norms. He’s arguing for attention to poetry’s distinctive contracts: compression, ambiguity, sound, and the productive “noise” that prose critics might call indulgence.

Subtext: critics can launder their own preferences as “standards.” By pretending there’s one neutral measure for all writing, they make poetry’s strangeness look like failure rather than choice. Context matters, too: early-to-mid 20th century modernism had expanded what counted as poetic technique, while an increasingly professionalized critical class policed taste in journals and universities. Ransom hears that policing and warns what it produces: not better poems, but safer ones.