Analyse Ransom’s thesis of criticism as an objective and scientific activity.
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CHAPTER THREE
Critical Theory of Ransom as a New Critic
The New Criticism was not a well-organised critical movement, and it had no
acknowledged leader as such. However, among the members of the group, John Crowe Ransom
provided leadership in more ways than one. He gave the movement its name which was
eponymous with the title of one of his well-known books, published in 1941. He was, again,
teacher to most of the New Critics by virtue of their association with Vanderbilt University
where Ransom was a member of the faculty. Though leading the movement from the front,
Ransom can hardly be lumped together with his New Critical brethren from whom he
distinguished himself in a number of ways.
Ransom sets the tone of his critical practice in the preface to his very first book of
criticism, The World's Body. Ransom is not willing to call the papers collected in the volume
criticism proper. Instead, those papers, dealing chiefly with poetic theory, are supposed to
prepare the grounds for criticism. Poetic theory, however, is not enunciated in isolation, but
comes out from Ransom's study of poetic instances - which at once puts us in mind of the
critical method adopted by Aristotle for expounding the principles of the Greek drama. Ransom's
added advantage was that he himself was a practising poet, a fact that made him conversant with
the craft of poetry-writing. In an age dominated by the rationalisation of science, poetry, for
Ransom, is an intellectual exercise. Hence the kind of poetry which tries to escape from the
unpleasant or unsavoury aspects of real life and construct a private world of wish-fulfilment has
no place here. Neither can that kind of poetry which, by the saturation of the heart's desire, fails
to create any ripple, find a place in this scheme of things. "The true poetry has no great interest