Ransom Center Magazine

Art

Season’s greetings in the Ransom Center’s collections

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“Dear Miss Crawford,” writes D. H. Lawrence in a letter dated December 23, 1909, “I hope my verses won’t offend you. I know they are poor enough. But do you like my little card?” The “little card,” sent to Grace Crawford and today part of the D. H. Lawrence collection at the Ransom Center, is a small, handmade Christmas greeting card, its front and back covers decorated with watercolors by Lawrence. On the front, four bees surround a stock of delicately drooping bluebells; one bee has attached itself to a flower. On the back, Lawrence has finely rendered a mayfly, with elegantly arranged wings and legs. [Read more…] about Season’s greetings in the Ransom Center’s collections

Powerful currents: John Wilson’s Down by the Riverside prints

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The dark male figure, head bent to the driving rain indicated by the dense lines that cover the page, lifts a slight woman into a simple rowboat. The boat’s bow is pointed through the floodwaters toward higher ground, its port side steadied by a second stooped male. [Read more…] about Powerful currents: John Wilson’s Down by the Riverside prints

Meticulous free verse: Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and Ellsworth Kelly

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“The literary value, if I may say it, of this span of empty space on the page, which mentally separates groups of words or words themselves, is to periodically accelerate or slow the movement, the scansion, the sequence even, given one’s simultaneous view of the entirety of the page…” (Stéphane Mallarmé, “Observation Relative au Poème Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard,” Cosmopolis, May 1897, p. 412 [trans.]) [Read more…] about Meticulous free verse: Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés and Ellsworth Kelly