SOURCE: Masselink, Noralyn. “Apparition Head versus Body Bush: The Prosodical Theory and Practice of John Crowe Ransom.” The Southern Quarterly 29, no. 2 (winter 1991): 17-30.

In the following essay, Masselink offers a prosodical study of Ransom's poetry and delineates the disparity between the subject of meter in his critical writings and his use of it in his own verse.

Concerning Ransom's techniques and ideas, Karl F. Knight observes in The Poetry of John Crowe Ransom: A Study of Diction, Metaphor, and Symbol, “Some aspects of his work have been treated with relative fullness, while other important elements have been merely touched on or hardly noticed” (10-11). Ironically, in 1964 at the time of Knight's publication, diction and metaphor were already two of the more fully treated aspects of Ransom's art, along with the poet's use of irony and his anti-Platonic philosophy. Ransom's prosody, on the other hand, while acknowledged by most...