SOURCE: Quinlan, Kieran. “Poems about ‘God.’” In John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith, pp. 14-24. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Quinlan contends that the religious themes of the poems comprising Poems about God reflect Ransom's early religious development.

Perhaps what strikes one most about Ransom as he prepared to return to the United States from Oxford in 1913 is his general buoyancy. Certainly that is the case whenever one thinks of a morbid Eliot in contrast. For Ransom, the pain of religious loss may already have become “chronic and low-grade,” for there is no sense whatever that he was suffering Arnoldian distress over the issue or that the loss was as traumatic as it had been for James and Dewey decades earlier. On the contrary, for several years afterwards Ransom was to take an almost wicked delight in slyly shocking the conventional beliefs of his...