And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its

Hear the solemn voice of John Crowe Ransom: “And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.” These words carry the lament of an age in which the old anchors of verse had been torn away, leaving the art adrift in a sea of uncertainty. Ransom, a leader among the New Critics, spoke at a time when industrial change, modernist experimentation, and the shifting tides of culture had unsettled the place of poetry in society. His cry is both a question and a warning: can poetry endure when the world no longer reveres it as it once did?

The origin of this thought lies in the transformation of the modern age. For centuries, poetry was the jewel of culture, the vessel of memory, the highest expression of thought. In ancient courts, the poet stood beside kings; in medieval cathedrals, verse shaped devotion; in the Renaissance, it crowned the intellect. But with the rise of newspapers, novels, cinema, and later the broadcast of sound and image, poetry found itself overshadowed. Its audience shrank, its role diminished. It became, as Ransom declared, precarious, vulnerable to neglect in a world hungry for faster, louder forms of art.

Yet precariousness is not death. Consider the fate of Homer’s epics after the written word arose. Once sung by bards in halls and marketplaces, they suddenly seemed at risk—how could oral poetry survive when the scroll and the book began to rule? But the Iliad and Odyssey did not die. They changed form, they found new guardians, they lived on through the written tradition, and later through countless retellings. Their position, too, was once precarious, yet they endured. So it is with every age of poetry: threatened, shaken, and yet—alive.

Ransom’s cry echoes another truth: that poetry thrives not when secure, but when pressed against adversity. The Romantic poets wrote in response to industrial alienation. The Harlem Renaissance poets rose in defiance of racism and exclusion. The war poets of the twentieth century wrote from trenches where life itself was precarious. Indeed, it may be that poetry’s very power emerges most fiercely when its survival seems uncertain. The precariousness Ransom names may be its curse, but also its secret strength.

We must see, too, that Ransom’s warning is not only historical but prophetic. In every age, poetry faces “new conditions”—whether technological, cultural, or spiritual. Today, it competes with digital screens, short attention spans, and floods of language without depth. Its position is still precarious. But this has always been so. The poet’s task is to speak even when drowned by noise, to plant seeds of meaning even in barren soil. Poetry has never ruled the majority; it has always been the flame kept alive by the few, passed down in precarious hands from generation to generation.

The lesson, then, is this: do not despair when poetry feels fragile or forgotten. Its strength is not in numbers but in depth, not in popularity but in truth. When Ransom warns of its precariousness, he is also reminding us of our duty—to guard it, to create it, to carry it forward. Each reader who memorizes a line, each writer who crafts a stanza, is part of this guardianship. So long as there are souls willing to tend its flame, poetry will not vanish, no matter how precarious its place in the world may seem.

In practice, let each seeker of words act thus: read poetry aloud, and let it live in your breath. Share poems with friends and children, and let them hear their rhythm. Write even if your poems are read by no one but yourself, for in writing them you keep the tradition alive. And above all, let poetry shape how you see the world—attentive, reverent, alive to mystery. For in this way, precarious though its position may be, poetry will endure through you.

Thus Ransom’s teaching endures: the place of poetry may always be precarious, but it is never powerless. It is like a flame in the wind—always at risk, yet capable of lighting a thousand more. Let us therefore not fear its fragility, but honor it, protect it, and pass it on, so that it may continue to burn in the hearts of generations yet unborn.