SOURCE: Cowan, Louise. “Innocent Doves: Ransom's Feminine Myth of the South.” In American Letters and the Historical Consciousness: Essays in Honor of Lewis P. Simpson, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Daniel Mark Fogel, pp. 191-213. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Cowan elucidates Ransom's Southern attitude toward women as evinced in his poetry.

The poems of John Crowe Ransom have been held in high regard during his lifetime and well beyond, widely heralded despite their apparent lack of kinship with other modernist verse. Nearly all of them were written before 1927, though Ransom revised individual pieces from time to time throughout his career. His alterations, apparently, were made more in an attempt to augment meaning than to improve style—an indication that, as he contended in several critical essays, ideas and rational argument, too, have their importance in poetry.¹ Indeed, his slender body of...