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And a wandering beauty is a blade out of its scabbard.You know how dangerous, gentlemen of threescore?May you know it yet ten more.

John Crowe Ransom

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John Crowe Ransom
Age: 86 †
Born: 1888
Born: April 30
Died: 1974
Died: July 3
Critic
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Pulaski
Tennessee
John Crowe Ransom
May
Wandering
Gentlemen
Blades
Wander
Gentleman
Ten
Dangerous
Beauty
Blade

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Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.
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Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.
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But we moderns are impatient and destructive.
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I am a lady young in beauty waiting Until my truelove comes, and then we kiss.
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He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.
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And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
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The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?
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Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.
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Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime Put on his pistols and went riding out But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.
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Would you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell? Or take your bodies honorless to Hell? In Heaven you have heard no marriage is, No white flesh tinder to your lecheries
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God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels.
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For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.
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Two evils, monstrous either one apart, Possessed me, and were long and loath at going: A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart, And in the wood the furious winter blowing.
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And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.
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In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.
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Or he can work it out as a metrical and formal exercise, but he will be disappointed in its content. The New Year's prospect fairly chills his daunting breast.
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I would not knock old fellows in the dust But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back His weapons were the old heart in his bust And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.
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And if no Lethe flows beneath your casement, And when ten years have not brought full effacement, Philosophy was wrong, and you may meet.
John Crowe Ransom