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PARTISAN REVIEW
his achievement, in this sense: he was at his best a fine poet, but
he chose not to be at his best generally, and therefore discharged
the debt to the less literate society which we can't find it in us to
take seriously. That's a sort of missionary feeling, with relief that
somebody else is doing the job. But in saying this much I don't
mean that I have let the question worry me .
Indeed, Ransom was so guarded in his public commentaries
that we have to resort to the letters to discover, on many issues, what
he felt. Sometimes there is no difference between his public and his
private opinion . He always liked Stevens's poetry, including the
philosophic poems that Jarrell made fun of-
"It
is G. E. Moore at
the spinet," Jarrell said of a passage from middle-Stevens. Ransom's
essay on Stevens, "The Planetary Poet"
(1964),
is explicit enough.
On Eliot, Ransom made reasonably honorable amends, but he
wrote nothing in public - not even his beautiful essay on "Gerontion"
- as forthcoming as his remark, in a letter of February
1965
to Tate,
that he felt "an intense sympathy at last with that tortured soul who
achieved serenity." On Hart Crane, Ransom agreed with Tate's
high estimate of
White Buildings
(1926),
and articulated it at signifi–
cant length, but in the end he put him down. In September
1967
he
wrote again to Tate:
He wrote some beautiful poems, which beside yours lacked starch
and substance and the sense of doom. Then he wrote
The Bridge,
where his gift wasn't working but dead. You and Eliot are the
unique poets of that period, and your performance was much
pithier than his, more memorable; until the greater parts of
Four
Quartets.
There are many other occasions on which the gap between private
and public commitment makes all the difference.
The editors of Ransom's letters have done a fine job: their elu–
cidations are just what we want to keep us uncluttered. Only one
oddity caught my eye. Ransom referred, in a letter of April
1927,
to
Fernandez's ')udgment." The editors say, in a footnote, that he is
probably alluding to Macedonio Fern·andez
(1884-1952),
"an Argen–
tinian philosopher, poet, and short-story writer who believed in tran–
scendental subjectivism."
It
may be true. But in the index the man
has become the more familiar Mexican-French critic Ramon Fer–
nandez, who indeed wrote of such issues as the character of intelli-
