Peter Cherches—in a lively FB thread resulting from Scarriet’s recent controversial poem on women, the New Criticism and the “chaste” Poe—was kind enough to link an article: John Crowe Ransom, the Kenyon Review were CIA. (Quick aside: my poem is not anti-woman.)
The public is slowly becoming aware of the stunning role of the CIA in modern art. The whole mystery revolves around why the CIA thought modern art was good for the U.S. cause, and can perhaps be unraveled by questioning whether the CIA is ultimately working for the best interests of the citizens of the United States.
Here then, is “Pure and Impure, part three,” Scarriet’s simple and accessible take on Modernism and Poe/Romanticism.
Ransom, CIA? What does that mean?
It means this:
Ransom was instrumental in taking poetry out of the public square and locking it away in the university.
The strategy was three-fold.
1. Promote the “new writing” which the public didn’t like, but was told was significant: Pound/Williams.
Make certain Byron was too “old” too appreciate. Befuddle the public with these critical choices. (WCW is older to us today than Byron was to Ransom back then.) Ransom’s essays “Criticism, Inc.” and “Poets Without Laurels” are the significant texts. I strongly advise you read them.
2. Replace professors who teach time-tested literature with writing professors who are poets themselves, eager, quite naturally, to follow the “new writing” (see no. 1 above) Evidence is overwhelming that the New Critics were on the ground-floor of the Writing Program Era. In fact, these two—New Criticism and Writing Programs—were the same. Engle at Iowa, Lowell at Iowa, were in the New Critic orbit. Allen Tate at Princeton. Even Ford Maddox Ford (Pound associate in Europe, ex-British War Propaganda Minister) who came over from Europe to teach in the U.S., joined the New Critics circle.
3. Make it clear that newspaper reviews are “amateur” and Criticism must be professionalized and made the last word—only in the university. Have the messengers be government education types with funding and influence, in addition to poet/professors such as the New Critics with an inside/textbook-writing track.
Does this sound like CIA? Institutional control, promoting what is “new” as the end-all justification by savvy men in suits—which slowly but steadily eliminates democracy, and, gleefully, sadistically, amorally, from a fake-superior position, dumbs down the population, strangling free-thinking in the public square.
Modernism.
And the New Critics/Pound clique reviled Poe. Why?
Poe was the “amateur” populist who was a writing program/detective fiction/Critical force all to himself and wasn’t “new” in any sort of fake way. Poe represented something the New Critics/New Writing/CIA suits couldn’t stomach.
The boiled-down truth from Scarriet.