Volume 12, Number 10 · May 22, 1969
Second Thoughts
By Denis Donoghue
The World's Body
by John Crowe Ransom
Louisiana State, 390 pp., $2.95 (paper)
John Crowe Ransom: Critical Essays and a Bibliography
edited by Thomas Daniel Young
Louisiana State, 290 pp., $8.50
Essays of Four Decades
by Allen Tate
Swallow Press, 640 pp., $10.00
The Fugitive Group: A Literary History
by Louise Cowan
Louisiana State, second printing, 277 pp., $2.45 (paper)
The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians
by John L. Stewart
Princeton, 552 pp., $12.50
My occasion is the appearance, in revised and enlarged editions, of John Crowe Ransom's The World's Body, first published in 1938, and Allen Tate's essays, which have been issued in several collections since 1936. Mr. Ransom, ever abstemious, has not given us a Collected Essays, but he has gone over The World's Body again and added a Postscript, a long essay in second thoughts. Mr. Tate has restored some essays which were displaced in earlier collections, and he has given examples of recent work, a fine appreciation of Herbert Read, an essay on modern poetry, and a rebuke addressed to those who cultivate the unliteral imagination. Mr. Young has brought together some of the most substantial essays on Ransom's work. The result is a big book which might have been bigger. I miss, from the testaments, Tate's recent celebration, but otherwise most of the important pieces are included: essays by Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz. The editorial spirit is somewhat protective: in company as fervent as this, Yvor Winters's strictures on Ransom might have been allowed.
Review, 4103 words
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