Intellectual Menopause

John Ransom is probably the clearest case of "intellectual menopause," a phrase first used by H. L. Mencken in 1917 about Theodore Dreiser's *The "Genius."* Ransom's essay "Regenerate but Unrepentant," in the 1930 Southern Agrarian manifesto *I'll Take My Stand*, is judged a hot mess of shoddy history and wishful thinking, though its prose is elegant. Michael O'Brien's 2019 article says Ransom reached an intellectual menopause in his early forties, after his poetry dried up, with only seven of his 168 poems written or published after early 1927.