Comparing “ Bells For John Whiteside & # 8217 ; s Daughter ” And “ Dead Boy ” Essay, Research Paper

Vivienne Koch ( 1950 )

Ransom begins to take ownership of another order of the fabulous. This is the fabrication of

childhood, childhood viewed as

artlessness, as a necessary status to knowledge which corrupts, and which is hard

and tragic in its kernel. The ultimate,

permissive grace given to this sort of cognition is most aglow in subsequently verse forms like

“ Dead Boy ” and “ Janet Waking. ” Here,

the clearest expounding is in the much-admired “ Bells for John Whiteside & # 8217 ; s

Daughter. ”

Louis D. Rubin, Jr. ( 1958 )

The thought of decease coming to small kids is a subject of several Ransom

verse forms. In “ Dead Boy ” the household gathers about the

cadaver of a dead kid, “ the small adult male rather dead. ” The often anthologized

“ Bells for John Whiteside & # 8217 ; s Daughter ” depicts a

small miss “ lying so prissily propped. “ Graham Hough

Beneath the more untalkative and allusive verse forms in the selected edition are

the same foundations as those of Poems About God.

But the tone has changed. Resignation, credence are non the appropriate words. The universe

is what it is, and the powers that

regulation it. There is no usage stating any more about that, straight. It is merely the contemplations

of this sturdy actuality in assorted

aspects of assorted human lives that Ransom & # 8217 ; s poesy feels called upon to cover with. Normally

little aspects. His poesy delectations in

seting monolithic and inescapable facts in little or delicate scenes. The kid learns

about decease, the most monolithic and inescapable

fact she will of all time hold to larn, through the decease of her pet biddy. It is a group of

clicking schoolgirls who are presented with

the image of bleary dilapidation. The rightly celebrated “ Bells for John Whiteside & # 8217 ; s

Daughter ” presents the whole of insatiate

vernal verve in the remembrance of the small miss harassing the geese unit of ammunition the

pool, and the whole unbelievable indignation of its

extinction in the image of her still graphic small organic structure in its casket. But there is no

more distressing deaf Eden with fruitless calls.

The facts being as they are it is more endurable to look at them in cross-lights than full

face & # 8211 ; as in “ Dead Boy, ” where the poignancy

of the kid & # 8217 ; s decease is approached merely by contrasting the female parent & # 8217 ; s heartache with the far

from loveable nature of the male child in life, and

both are subordinated to the deep dynastic lesion suffered by the old household. Yet these

little, hapless, and unostentatious deceases

are the same Death as that of the hired adult male in “ Grace, ” dropping among his puke

under the violent death Sun, for which the talker

arraigned his God.

from “ John Crowe Ransom: The Poet and the Critic. ” Southern

Review ( 1965 ) .

Cary Nelson

One might innocently presume sarcasm was at work in opening John Crowe

Ransom & # 8217 ; s Selected Poems and detecting the rubrics

he gave to its two chief subdivisions: “ The Innocent Doves ” and “ The Manliness

of Men. “ & # 8217 ; It does non take long, nevertheless, before

one realizes that these classs are meant earnestly, despite his wry tone and bemused

position on all human enterprise. In

the 1924 verse form “ Miriam Tazewell ” a adult female weeps when a boom storm interruptions and

subsequently walks out to see “ her lawn

deflowered. ” Apparently this is the kind of sophomoric gag Ransom imagines his male

readers basking together. It seems to

her “ the whole universe was scoundrel, / The rule of the animal was low and

masculine. ” In “ Lady Lost, ” foremost published in 1925, in

which a bird serves as a figure for all adult females, the talker asks “ h

as anybody /

Injured some all right adult female in some dark manner? ” If

so, it represents no existent job:

Let the proprietor semen and claim ownership,

No inquiries will be asked. But stroke her gently

With loving words, and she will obviously

Tax return to her full soft-haired white-breasted manner

And her right place and her right passion.

His verse forms are full of foolish misss and worldly work forces. When Ransom & # 8217 ; s work forces

commit mistakes of pride, the monetary value paid is manfully and

imposing: solid oaks split, winter storms work stoppage, or battlegrounds are strewn with dead.

Ransom & # 8217 ; s adult females coquette and waver and give

themselves over merely to woo or its rejection. Despite all this, his sexism is non

unselfconscious. It is instead a deliberate and

witty attempt to joint what he sees as the differences between work forces and adult females. Yet of

all the well-known modern American

poets his work may be the most exhaustively constituted by misogynism, for his whole poetic

undertaking is founded on an

overdone and absurdly stereotyped position of sexual difference. Subtract these positions and

there are few verse forms left, no calling

to talk of staying. However, the verse forms are excessively elaborately crafted, their enunciation

excessively surprising, for Ransom & # 8217 ; s sexism to

warrant simple indignation. And frequently plenty the rhetoric of his humor offers pleasances that

counter the pettiness of his capable affair

and his attitude toward it. But his calling is eventually entirely circumscribed by platitudes

about work forces and adult females that he could non see

beyond.

A conservative reader might try to support Ransom by observing that some of the more

condescending verse forms are written to

immature misss, non mature adult females, but the consequence of his Selected Poems, which mixes verse forms

devoted to adult females of a assortment of

ages, is to do older adult females and immature misss interchangeable. The extra verse form in his

single books, furthermore, add

significantly to the sense that a defeated idealism underlies a generalised misogynism in

his work.

Although one would non cognize it from the surface of Ransom & # 8217 ; s verse forms, for illustration, their

constituent fury at adult females is once more

historically grounded. In Ransom & # 8217 ; s desperation at the alterations he saw in the state and in his

sorrow at the passing of the old South

is besides a hurt about destabilized gender dealingss. In Ransom we see how condescending

idealisation can germinate into an

oppressive but deceivingly elegant system of gender distinction. It is a theoretical account of

sophisticated bias that no nonpoetic

discourse could give us in such perfected signifier.

In “ The Cloak Model ” & # 8217 ; a immature adult male is described ( by an older talker ) as

conceive ofing that a adult female & # 8217 ; s “ wide forehead meant

intelligence, ” that “ her fresh immature tegument was artlessness, / alternatively of meat that

shone. ” The older adult male draws his attending to

“ God & # 8217 ; s oldest gag, everlastingly fresh ; / The fact that in the finest flesh / There isn & # 8217 ; T

any psyche. ” “ The Cloak Model ” was non reprinted

in Ransom & # 8217 ; s Selected Poems, but at that place excessively sexual difference is pervasively, if frequently less

blatantly, constituent. “ Dead Boy, ” for

illustration, mourns the loss of a complex, equivocal, single human being ; “ Bells for

John Whiteside & # 8217 ; s Daughter, ” on the other

manus, mourns an empty, broad feminine artlessness: “ We are annoyed at her brown

survey / Lying so prissily propped. ”

Furthermore, the male kid is taken as a figure for the ambivalent position of southern

history and civilization ; the female kid is

resolutely other. In the really inescapability of its compulsions, Ransom & # 8217 ; s poesy in bend

can assist us to concentrate on the political relations of

sexual difference in modern poesy in general.

Copyright? 1999 by Cary Nelson