John Crowe Ransom

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John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in 1941. Photo by Robie Macauley.
Born(1888-04-30)April 30, 1888
DiedJuly 3, 1974(1974-07-03) (aged 86)
Resting placeKenyon College Cemetery, Gambier, Ohio
NationalityAmerican
Alma materVanderbilt University (B.A.)
Christ Church, Oxford (M.A.)
Occupations
  • Educator
  • scholar
  • literary critic
  • poet
  • essayist
EmployerKenyon College
Known forNew Criticism school of literary criticism
PartnerRobb Reavill
AwardsRhodes Scholarship, Bollingen Prize for Poetry, National Book Award

John Crowe Ransom (April 30, 1888 – July 3, 1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the

Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist. He was nominated for the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1]

Background

John Crowe Ransom was born on April 30, 1888, in

Methodist minister.[2] His mother was Sara Ella (Crowe) Ransom (1859–1947).[2] He had two sisters, Annie Phillips and Ella Irene, and one brother, Richard.[2] He grew up in Spring Hill, Franklin, Springfield, and Nashville, Tennessee.[2] He was home schooled until age ten.[2] From 1899 to 1903, he attended the Bowen School, a public school whose headmaster was Vanderbilt alumnus Angus Gordon Bowen.[2][3]

He entered

Kenyon Review
in 1959. Photo by Thomas Greenslade.

Career

Ransom taught Latin for one year at the Hotchkiss School alongside Samuel Claggett Chew (1888–1960).[2] He was then appointed to the English department at Vanderbilt University in 1914. During the First World War, he served as an artillery officer in France.[2] After the war, he returned to Vanderbilt.[2] He was a founding member of the Fugitives, a Southern literary group of sixteen writers that functioned primarily as a kind of poetry workshop and included Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Under their influence, Ransom, whose first interest had been philosophy (specifically John Dewey and American pragmatism) began writing poetry. His first volume of poems, Poems about God (1919), was praised by Robert Frost and Robert Graves. The Fugitive Group had a special interest in Modernist poetry and, under Ransom's editorship, started a short-lived but highly influential magazine, called The Fugitive, which published American Modernist poets, mainly from the South (though they also published Northerners like Hart Crane). Out of all the Fugitive poets, Norton poetry editors Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair opined that, "[Ransom's poems were] among the most remarkable," characterizing his poetry as "quirky" and "at times eccentric."[5]


In 1930, alongside eleven other

industrialism that appeared to be sweeping away traditional Southern culture.[6] The Agrarians believed that the Southern tradition, rooted in the pre-Civil War agricultural model, was the answer to the South's economic and cultural problems. His contribution to I'll Take My Stand is his essay Reconstructed but Unregenerate which starts the book and lays out the Southern Agrarians' basic argument. In various essays influenced by his Agrarian beliefs, Ransom defended the manifesto's assertion that modern industrial capitalism was a dehumanizing force that the South should reject in favor of an agrarian economic model. However, by the late 1930s he began to distance himself from the movement, and in 1945, he publicly criticized it.[7]
He remained an active essayist until his death even though, by the 1970s, the popularity and influence of the New Critics had seriously diminished.

In 1937, he accepted a position at

Kenyon Review, and continued as editor until his retirement in 1959.[8] In 1966, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
.

He has few peers among twentieth-century American university teachers of humanities; his distinguished students included

Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1951. His 1963 Selected Poems received the National Book Award the following year.[12]

He primarily wrote short poems examining the ironic and unsentimental nature of life (with domestic life in the American South being a major theme). An example of his Southern style is his poem "Janet Waking", which "mixes modernist with old-fashioned country rhetoric."[13] He was noted as a strict formalist, using both regular rhyme and meter in almost all of his poems. He also occasionally employed archaic diction. Ellman and O'Clair note that "[Ransom] defends formalism because he sees in it a check on bluntness, on brutality. Without formalism, he insists, poets simply rape or murder their subjects." [14]

He was a leading figure of the school of literary criticism known as the New Criticism, which gained its name from his 1941 volume of essays The New Criticism. The New Critical theory, which dominated American literary thought throughout the middle 20th century, emphasized close reading, and criticism based on the texts themselves rather than on non-textual bias or non-textual history. In his seminal 1937 essay, "Criticism, Inc." Ransom laid out his ideal form of literary criticism stating that, "criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic." To this end, he argued that personal responses to literature, historical scholarship, linguistic scholarship, and what he termed "moral studies" should not influence literary criticism. He also argued that literary critics should regard a poem as an aesthetic object.[15] Many of the ideas he explained in this essay would become very important in the development of The New Criticism. "Criticism, Inc." and a number of Ransom's other theoretical essays set forth some of the guiding principles that the New Critics would build upon. Still, his former students, specifically Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, had a greater hand in developing many of the key concepts (like "close reading") that later came to define the New Criticism.

In 1951, he was awarded the

National Institute of Arts and Letters.[16]

Personal life and death

In 1920, he married Robb Reavill, a well-educated young woman who shared his interest in sports and games.[17] Together they raised three children: a daughter, Helen, and two sons, David and John.[18]

Ransom died on July 3, 1974, in Gambier at the age of eighty-six. He was buried at the Kenyon College Cemetery in Gambier.

Bibliography

Literary criticism

  • The World's Body. (C. Scribner's Sons, Ltd., 1938.)
  • The New Criticism. (New Directions, 1941).
  • God without thunder: an unorthodox defense of orthodoxy (Archon Books, 1965).

Poetry collections

Anthologies

  • The Poetry of 1900-1950 (1951).[22]
  • The Past Half-century in Literature: A Symposium (National Council of English Teachers, 1952).[23]
  • Poems and Essays (Random House, 1965).[24]
  • Beating the bushes: selected essays, 1941-1970 (New Directors, 1972).[25]

Textbook

  • A College Primer of Writing (H.Holt and Company, 1943).[26]

Notes

  1. ^ "Nomination Archive - John Crowe Ransom". NobelPrize.org. March 2024. Retrieved 14 March 2024.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o "A John Crowe Ransom Chronology".
  3. ^ Collections, Vanderbilt University Special (28 August 2006). "Preparatory Academies and Vanderbilt University". www.library.vanderbilt.edu.
  4. . Herbert charles Sanborn.
  5. ^ Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Second Edition. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1973. 467.
  6. ^ Conkin, Paul K. The Southern Agrarians. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1988.
  7. ^ Conkin, Paul K. The Southern Agrarians. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1988.
  8. .
  9. OCLC 968552087.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  10. ^ Jarrell, Randall. "Fifty Years of American Poetry." No Other Book: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
  11. ^ "National Book Awards – 1964". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-03.
    (With essay by John Murillo from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
  12. ^ Tillinghast 1997
  13. ^ Ellman, Richard and Robert O'Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Second Edition. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1973. 467.
  14. ^ Ransom, John Crowe. Criticism, Inc." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed Vincent Leitch, et al. New York, W. W. Norton Co., 2001. 11108-1118.
  15. ^ "Letter from Mark Van Doren, Secretary, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, NYC in invitation to their Ceremonial on May 2, 1951, accompanied by a program for the event". American Foundation for the Blind Helen Keller Archive. New York, NY: American Foundation for the Blind. 25 May 1951.
  16. .
  17. ^ Whitman, Alden (July 4, 1974). "John Crowe Ransom, the Poet, Is Dead". The New York Times. p. 22. Retrieved May 25, 2020.
  18. ^ Ransom, John Crowe (28 August 2018). "Chills and fever, poems". A.A. Knopf – via Google Books.
  19. ^ Ransom, John Crowe (28 August 2018). "Grace After Meat". Leonard & Virginia Woolf – via Google Books.
  20. – via Google Books.
  21. ^ Ransom, John Crowe (28 August 2018). "The Poetry of 1900-1950". Kenyon College – via Google Books.
  22. ^ "The Past Half-century in Literature: A Symposium". National Council of English Teachers. 28 August 2018 – via Google Books.
  23. ^ Ransom, John Crowe (28 August 1965). "Poems and Essays". Random House – via Google Books.
  24. – via Google Books.
  25. – via Google Books.

References

External links