Abstract
To my way of thinking, the most profound prose statement of John Crowe Ransom's vision of community is found in his essay "Forms and Citizens," published in The World's Body in 1938.1 It is generally asserted, with varying degrees of reprehension, that in the years following the publication of I'll Take My Stand, Ransom increasingly turned his attention to purely "aesthetic" concerns; the essay "Forms and Citizens" is usually viewed as belonging to Ransom's aesthetic canon. Yet surely the roots of Ransom's aesthetic view of community are found in his essay "Reconstructed But Unregenerate" (and in the introductory "Statement of Principles," also his composition) in I'll Take My Stand. It seems appropriate, then, to ask in what Ransom's aesthetic vision of community consists. What are its foundations, its implications, and its end?
