The only other well known American poet with
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More lately I met Mr. Louis Untermeyer who knewabout Ransom and seemed to rate his work as highly as I did. difference between New. Hampshire and Tennessee,but common ground appears both in their manner andmatter. In their manner, we find an extremely fastidi-ous art disguised by colloquialisms and a pretence of“every-which-way”’ (to borrow Frost’s own word). Intheir matter, we discover both poets acting spokesmenfor those rebellious “poor whites” (in the political andplutocratic sense) who find the narrow puritanism oftheir fathers not enough for their needs, and turningsceptic, at first with violence, are beginning to adopt anew religion of nature-worship and toleration of theirfellows. Neither Frost nor Ransom had any local poetictradition on which to build and had each to evolve hisown. The history of Tennessee however has for the lastseventy years been a more exciting and unhappy onethan that of the mountain country to the North of Bos-ton; Ransom gives us a glimpse of poor white agricul-ture and a hired-man problem not unlike Frost’s, butwe must remember that Nashville itself is a very pro-gressive business town and that Vanderbilt is more thanthe usual provincial university. A gently ironic poem“The Southern Mansion” has just come to me fromRansom, too late to include in the body of this book,but excellent to quote some stanzas from here; it ispost-European-War Tennessee looking at pre-Civil-War Tennessee. The stresses in this poem are char-acteristic of the latest phase of Ransom’s art and right 3 enough, but they demand a watchful and sympathetic reader. As an intruder I trudged with careful innocenceTo mask decently a quite meddlesome stare,Passing the old house often on its eminence,Exhaling my foreign weed on its weighted air. Here age seemed newly imaged for the historianAfter his monstrous chateaux on the Loire ;—A beauty not for depicting by old vulgarianReiterations which gentle readers abhor. Each time of seeing I absorbed some other featureOf a house whose legend could in no wise be briefNor ignoble. For it expired as sweetly as Nature,With her tinge of oxidation on autumn leaf. . .
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