The Dualistic Faith of John Crowe Ransom

My review of The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom has just been published in The Weekly Standard.  From the article:

"Even in his Oxford days, Ransom was coming to see his own life story as a prototype for the sons of the modern South, and of the West more generally. Methodist Christianity had begun as a kind of "fundamentalism," a faith born of the fear of a thunderous God. Protestantism had stripped away God's thunder, however, and given us a mild and friendly Christ instead. Little by little, Ransom would complain to Tate, 'the God of the Jews has been whittled down into the spirit of science, or the spirit of love, of the spirit of Rotary; and now religion is not religion at all, but a purely secular experience, like Y.M.C.A. and Boy Scouts.'"

Click the picture to read the rest.  I discuss Ransom's literary-critical project at length in The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking​.

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