Thanks to his friend Cleanth Brooks, who was the guest editor for that issue, McLuhan published ‘The ‘Analogical Mirrors’ in The Kenyon Review in 1944. The general editor of the review was the poet, John Crowe Ransom, who took an interest in McLuhan work, but not an uncritical one. In fact, his advice proved prescient for McLuhan’s development over the crucial 1945-1960 period (his age roughly 35 to 50).

Ransom’s interest had undoubtedly been spurred by Brooks who was attempting to find outlets for McLuhan’s work. But his interest seems to have been genuine enough quite aside from Brooks’ prompting:

I don’t think you should stay on the sidelines. I admire the authority and the excellent writing in your paper. (Ransom to McLuhan, 25 September 1943, in Gordon 135)¹

We haven’t had anything of yours for a long time and I hope it won’t be much longer before we can see something. I talked with Cleanth Brooks a short while ago; he is an admirer of yours, and told me of some smart things you had talked [about] with him” (Ransom to McLuhan, 12 January 1946, in Gordon 386n49)

Ransom’s criticism of McLuhan’s reliance on Leavis’ moralism as a trumping response to the irony and ambiguity of Richards and Empson would come to be shared by McLuhan himself:

Ransom
I can’t quite feel that Leavis is the answer to Richards and Empson; the best answer; the perfect complement. I believe we need re-examinations of the aesthetic problem more radical than that. (Ransom to McLuhan, 25 September 1943. in Gordon 380n5)

McLuhan
For many years, until I wrote my first book², The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student.

Ransom’s letter was written in reaction to McLuhan’s paper, ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson’, which McLuhan had submitted to Kenyon Review for consideration.³ And, indeed, the turn from Leavis to Yeats, Pound, Joyce and Eliot would be crucial for McLuhan’s development toward media science. Instead of attempting to disable irony and ambiguity through strident moralisms (which he continued until sometime in the middle 1940s),⁴ McLuhan would come to see how to utilize them for investigation and analysis.⁵ This would occasion McLuhan’s characteristic turn from claim to discipline, from message to medium.

His ‘media’ would be exactly ‘types of ambiguity’ — as the title of Empson’s 1930 The Seven Types of Ambiguity ran — but these would be structural types, not Empson’s categorial ones. Here again Ransom was prescient:

I wish you didn’t rely on ambiguous terms like dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar. (Ransom to McLuhan, 31 Aug 1947, in Gordon 386n49)

With the trivial arts of dialectic, rhetoric and grammar, McLuhan already had the crucial matter of the irreducible plurality of ontologies: “the essential opposition between the arts of the trivium” (Classical Trivium, 42). This entailed, as he said in the same place, that “in studying the history of dialectics and rhetoric, as indeed, of grammar, it is unavoidable that one adopts the point of view of one of these arts” (Classical Trivium, 41). This was unavoidable since one could not be without an ontology, on the one hand, but, on the other, once one had one, it necessarily excluded, at least at the level of element, the others.

This introduced an even more basic ambiguity than Ransom contemplated. Words were first of all ambiguous, not because not enough care had been taken in their definition and use, but because they always already implicated an ontological foundation that was radically undecided because plural. This was what Yeats, Pound, Joyce and Eliot had discovered: ambiguities in expression are not the province of fine art or of morality or of any such specialized area, but go down into the roots of the being at stake, human being.

The arts were subservient to these roots, not vice versa:

Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation.⁶ I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience 

All the acts of humans beginning with language use and ordinary experience  were mediated by the ontological possibilities before them. The questions he began to face starting in the late 1940s were: how to understand this insight himself and how to communicate it to others?