Ransom, John Crowe

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Selected Poems
John Crowe Ransom
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0679402578
Release Date: 1991-06-25

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Much appreciated.......2007-04-18

Several years ago I was looking for a collection of the poems of John Crowe Ransom. This was the only one out there, so I bought it. I figured it would be some university press paperback, maybe even one of those books that looks like it was photocopied from some earlier edition. I was surprised. This edition of Ransom's poems is beautiful--not just the poetry, but the care that went into building the book. From the binding to the font, this is a work of art.

I very much appreciate that the publisher commemorates Ransom's small but substantial contribution to the art of poetry with a book that rises to the occasion.

Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence

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For Decentralized Politics and Private Property!
Highly recommended for students of politics & economics.

Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence
Robert Penn Warren , Andrew Lytle , Mary Shattuck Fisher , John Crowe Ransom , Donald Davisdon , Cleanth Brooks , Lyle H. Lanier , and Hilaire Belloc
Manufacturer: ISI Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Similar Items:

I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Library of Southern Civilization)
Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver
The Southern Tradition : The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism
Fathers
Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals

ASIN: 1882926374

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For Decentralized Politics and Private Property!.......2004-09-25

~Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence~ are a group of agrarians and conservative thinkers with a sobering culture critique where they advance the case for decentralised politics and widespread distribution of private property! They extoled the need for vibrant regionalism within the the nation-state. They recognized that one must surely be an Ohioan, Texan or Virginian as they are an American. This book was published in 1936 as the Great Depression become more depressing. This is the classic sequel to I'll Take My Stand, but the contributors frame their critique in national terms rather than southern sectional terms. It is an anthology that is a selection of articles and essays from various agrarian and conservative writers, mostly from the South and Midwest. Moreover, the contributing authors essentially represented a cross-section of thinkers from southern conservatives to Midwestern agrarians. They have much common ground, but some differences as well. There major focus in the book was a critique of America's culture and increasingly centralized economic-political structure. They offered a prescriptive formula for a renewed America landscape and body politic. This was to be characterized by widespread ownership of private property, small-scale enterprises coupled with preservation of the American entrepreneurial spirit and a decentralised political system amenable to the people at the state and local level.

Allen Tate's 'Notes on Liberty and Property' in my estimation is the keystone of this book. Tate's essay concentrates on the correlation between political freedom and the widespread diffusion of freehold private property amongst the citizenry. Andrew Lytle's 'The Small Farm Secures the State' is also a meaningful contribution. Donald Davidson's ideas on regionalism were rather unlikable to me given that he favors establishing regional political blocs at the expense of state sovereignty. It seems evident that making politics more decentralised would not entail annihilating state sovereignty. The shared ideal embodied in the text of this New Declaration of Independence was that Americans should be independent not only of big government but its attendant companion big business. The agrarians are not anti-capitalist per say or demagogues; but as Anglo-Catholic distributist G.K. Chesterton quipped that "the problem with capitalism is that there are not enough capitalists." The contributors together reasoned that the increasing corporate collectivism and growth of collectively-managed property is tantamount to the destruction of private property, and will inevitably yield to the attendant perils that come with socialism. The authors buoy the case that there is a strong correlation between political freedom and a widespread diffusion of political power and economic resources. They were, by and large, critical of an interventionist imperial foreign policy and tended to favor trust-busting to uproot monopolistic cartels. They offered a bleak prognosis if the continuing concentration of power and capital goes unabated. The agrarian writers seem to be enmeshed with ideas of trade protectionism which would be anathema to their conservative forefathers John Taylor of Caroline and John Calhoun. While against the New Deal, a few contributors tinge on advocacy of too much government meddling in economy. I say this not to malign the spirit of the book again recollecting that they advocate political decentralization and a market economy.

Mary Fisher's essay entitled 'The Emancipation of Woman' is eerily prophetic of bad sociological trends in early twentieth century that have reached fruition today. Fisher addresses how women ostensibly seeking "emancipation" from motherhood have been pushed into a dehumanizing existence in the workplace. Today, the woman has to work to pay family's share of income tax. Erstwhile children have come to be viewed by many as a liability, a burden and something entirely undesirable. Feminism is perhaps the greatest misnomer of all time, it ran amok where it disavowed the femininity of women in favor of androgyny. The trauma of the Second World War and the Sexual Revolution exacerbated the attack on traditional womanhood and the family. Nature and tradition set the ordinary course of a woman in day-to-day life as being involved with family in her distinct role as nurturer, as the life-giver, and as a mother. Fisher's essay is alarmist, but a needed critique as the so called Emancipated Women is becoming an atomized cog in economic machine and alienated as her natural state of being is attacked by an increasingly materialistic society. Today, being a homemaker carries a stigmatism of being a pariah, which is profoundly out of kelter.

The final essay features English Anglo-Catholic distributivist Hilaire Belloc who offers a critique of 'Modern Man.'

All things considered, this book is a spirited critique of crass Yankee capitalism run amok; big business and big government go hand in hand. It offers so sound, prudent social and culture criticism with Southern and Midwestern sobriety. The ideas pressed forward in this book generally have a largely Jeffersonian flavor, a trenchant Tocqueville style of analysis and Calhoun's clarity of communicating ideas.

* * * * * * * * * * *

There is an aura of populist conservatism with a distinctively Southern and Midwestern sense of sobriety, in such statements as:

"The diversity of regions rather enriches the national life than impoverishes it, and their mere existence as regions cannot be said to constitute a problem. Rather in their differences they are a national advantage, offering not only the charm of variety but the interplay of points of view that ought to give flexibility and wisdom... The regions should be free to cultivate their own particular genius and to find their happiness..., in the pursuits to which their people are best adapted, the several regions supplementing and aiding each other, in national comity, under a well-balanced economy." -Donald Davidson

"...The diffusion of an energetic population over our vast territory is an object of far greater importance to the national growth and prosperity than the proceeds of the sale of the land to the highest bidder in the open market..." -Andrew Johnson

"Corporate mergers and all devices of economic and legal control, usurious interest with wholesale foreclosure, unsound manipulation of the nation's volume of money by banker, broker, and politician-all these have made of us a nation of dispossessed people." -John C. Rawe

"The joint-stock corporation, when overgrown, is the enemy of private property in the same sense communism is. The collectivist state is the logical development of the giant corporate ownership, and, if it comes, it will signalize the triumph of Big Business." -Richard B. Ransom

"The elected candidate, in the President's chair and in Congress, was supposed to represent the people and to foster the general welfare. In practice, they represented the will of the Northeast and fostered the welfare of the Northeast..." -Donald Davidson

"The Northeast has manipulated the Federal mechanism so as to encourage, as a cardinal objective of national policy, a gross overemphasis on industrialism and speculative finance, with a corresponding injury and neglect of agriculture and small business, to say nothing of the general injury resulting to manners, morals, and human happiness." -Donald Davidson

If you find this book interesting than I would recommend reading economic critiques and treatises by Wilhelm Roepke, G.K. Chesteron and Hillare Belloc.

Highly recommended for students of politics & economics........2000-03-05

Who Owns America? is a collection of informative, challenging, iconoclastic and articulate essays on the nature of industrialism, corporate capitalism, the bureaucratic state, private property, the "good" society, and neo-Jeffersonian visions of a decentralized America. From David Cushman Coyle's "The Fallacy of Mass Production", to Frank Lawrence Owsley's "The Foundations of Democracy", to James Muir Waller's "America and Foreign Trade", to Robert Penn Warren's Literature as a Symptom", to Hilaire Belloc's "The Modern Man", these and many more observant and insightful commentaries deserve as wide a readership as possible and are highly recommended to students of American politics, economics, and history.

The Superfluous Men: Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945

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The Superfluous Men: Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945
George Santayana , Ralph Adams Cram , Albert Jay Nock , H.L. Mencken , Irving Babbitt , Paul Elmer More , Allen Tate , John Crowe Ransom , Donald Davisdon , and Walter Lippmann
Manufacturer: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The State of the Union: Essays in Social Criticism
Ideas Have Consequences
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
God and Man at Yale
The Ambassadors (Penguin Classics)

ASIN: 1882926307

Amazon.com

The roots of modern conservatism as an intellectual and political movement have been explored extensively by a variety of writers, but almost all attention has been focused on ideas and events following the Second World War. Editor Robert M. Crunden seeks to go deeper, in this anthology of prewar material. He brings together a group of authors bound by what one of them calls a concern over "the spiritual disorder of modern life--its destruction of human integrity and its lack of purpose." Contributors include academics, polemicists, and journalists: Irving Babbit, Walter Lippmann, H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, John Crowe Ransom, George Santayana, Allen Tate, and others. These "superfluous men" (the odd term is derived from Nock's influential book Memoirs of a Superfluous Man) did not consider themselves part of an inchoate conservatism, although a number of them were allied in the New Humanist and Southern agrarian movements. And although they write from decades long past, their voices rarely seem distant. Here is Donald Davidson with an antimaterialist critique of industrial progress (as personified by Henry Ford) that could apply to the roaring economy at the turn of the 21st century: <blockquote>[The masses] must spend and spend unceasingly, in order to consume the never-ending stream of new products that industry hurls upon them. They will be encouraged to make a necessity of every luxury that the clever industrialists may devise. For the industry of the Ford type has not regard for actual or fundamental needs! It seeks to create two or even twenty demands where none at all existed before.</blockquote> Serious students of conservatism will surely want to have a copy of The Superfluous Men on their shelves, near Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind and George M. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. --John J. Miller

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The New Criticism.
John Crowe Ransom
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press Reprint
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Criticism | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0837190797

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Selected Poems
John Crowe Ransom
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0394404491
Release Date: 1969-08-12

Beating the Bushes; Selected Essays, 1941-1970.

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Beating the Bushes; Selected Essays, 1941-1970.
John Crowe Ransom
Manufacturer: W W Norton & Co Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy
John Crowe (ed) Ransom
Manufacturer: Collier Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000LB79UC

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Beating the Bushes Selected Essays 1941-1970
Ransom, John Crowe
Manufacturer: New Directions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K7OE4G

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Poems & Essays
John Crowe Ransom
Manufacturer: VINTAGE BOOKS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000SE889S

Kenyon Review Spring 1940 (Vol. II No. 2)

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Kenyon Review Spring 1940 (Vol. II No. 2)
John Crowe Ransom
Manufacturer: Kenyon College
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HYTM1W

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