128
PARTISAN REVIEW
turned it down. He wasn't sufficiently interested in literary criticism
to leave a congenial teaching post for its sake.
The letters, like the men, are miles apart. Jarrell enjoyed
writing to more forthcoming people than Ransom: he liked being in
touch with the magazines, the reviews, sharing lore with Warren,
Tate, Lowell, Peter Taylor-his best friend, when all is said-and
later with Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich.
He wrote a wonderful essay on Ransom's poems and construed them
as reports from the endless war of authority and love.
In
return,
Ransom wrote an appreciation of Jarrell's work, just and accurate
but not lavish. He admired
Picturesfrom an Institution,
and some of the
poems, but he didn't, I think, regard Jarrell as a crucial poet.
Ransom's most engaging letters came at the beginning, espe–
cially when he was making notes for a theory of poetry and trying
them out on Tate.
It
is clear that he resented Tate's addiction to
T. S. Eliot and took the formal procedures of
The Waste Land
as pro–
viding an occasion big enough to make a quarrel. Ransom's head
was full of Hardy, and he couldn't or wouldn't let himself hear the
music that holds the seemingly discontinuous parts of Eliot's poem
sufficiently together. Tate took to those procedures as if he were
born to them; though in his own poems he had to wait and work
many years before finding an enabling music for his feelings.
Blackmur justly said of Tate's
The Winter Sea
that the poetry "is
troubled by knowledge that has not quite got into it - or has gotten
into the rhythm without having transpired into the words." Many of
Tate's poems "have in them a commotion that agitates in obscurity
without ever quite articulating through the surface." No reader has
ever felt that of Ransom's poems: every commotion that provoked
them transpires in the surface and is admitted only on that condi–
tion. Tate's early and middle poems sound as if they were not quite
ready to be produced and had been sent into the world with their
sense of the experiences that incited them still incomplete. Ransom's
poems are few because his demand, in the matter of completeness,
amounted to a morality, and he was rarely satisfied. He couldn't risk
disgracing the Latin and English metres he loved.
In
Ransom's early letters to Tate, we see how the notes nudge
him beyond the stage of hunches and prejudices toward a full
aesthetic theory. The prejudices are already in place. There is the
poet's hostility to science, which he expressed in the essay "Classical
and Romantic" (1929) and again in "Poetry: A Note in Ontology"
(1934):
