John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom | |
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Born | |
Died | July 3, 1974 Gambier, Ohio, US | (aged 86)
Resting place | Kenyon College Cemetery, Gambier, Ohio |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Vanderbilt University (B.A.) Christ Church, Oxford (M.A.) |
Occupations |
|
Employer | Kenyon College |
Known for | New Criticism school of literary criticism |
Partner | Robb Reavill |
Awards | Rhodes 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
Background
John Crowe Ransom was born on April 30, 1888, in
He entered
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]
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Conservatism in the United States |
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In 1930, alongside eleven other
In 1937, he accepted a position at
He has few peers among twentieth-century American university teachers of humanities; his distinguished students included
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
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
- Poems About God (Henry Holt & Co., 1919).
- Chills and Fever (A.A. Knopf, 1924).[19]
- Includes "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter"
- Grace after Meat (1924).[20]
- Two Gentlemen in Bonds (Knopf, 1927).[21]
- Selected Poems (Knopf, 1963)
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
- ^ "Nomination Archive - John Crowe Ransom". NobelPrize.org. March 2024. Retrieved 14 March 2024.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o "A John Crowe Ransom Chronology".
- ^ Collections, Vanderbilt University Special (28 August 2006). "Preparatory Academies and Vanderbilt University". www.library.vanderbilt.edu.
- ISBN 9780807104545.
Herbert charles Sanborn.
- ^ Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Second Edition. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1973. 467.
- ^ Conkin, Paul K. The Southern Agrarians. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1988.
- ^ Conkin, Paul K. The Southern Agrarians. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1988.
- ISBN 0-8071-0255-5.
- ISBN 0-8240-9249-X
- )
- ^ Jarrell, Randall. "Fifty Years of American Poetry." No Other Book: Selected Essays. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
- ^
"National Book Awards – 1964". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-03.
(With essay by John Murillo from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) - ^ Tillinghast 1997
- ^ Ellman, Richard and Robert O'Clair, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Second Edition. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1973. 467.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "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.
- ISBN 978-0618588947.
- ^ Whitman, Alden (July 4, 1974). "John Crowe Ransom, the Poet, Is Dead". The New York Times. p. 22. Retrieved May 25, 2020.
- ^ Ransom, John Crowe (28 August 2018). "Chills and fever, poems". A.A. Knopf – via Google Books.
- ^ Ransom, John Crowe (28 August 2018). "Grace After Meat". Leonard & Virginia Woolf – via Google Books.
- ISBN 9780598852786– via Google Books.
- ^ Ransom, John Crowe (28 August 2018). "The Poetry of 1900-1950". Kenyon College – via Google Books.
- ^ "The Past Half-century in Literature: A Symposium". National Council of English Teachers. 28 August 2018 – via Google Books.
- ^ Ransom, John Crowe (28 August 1965). "Poems and Essays". Random House – via Google Books.
- ISBN 9780835770866– via Google Books.
- ISBN 9780686174059– via Google Books.
References
- Buffington, Robert, The Equilibrist: A Study of John Crowe Ransom's Poems,1916-1963,Vanderbilt University Press, 1967.
- Cary Nelson and Edward Brunner, "John Crowe Ransom" Archived 2008-12-19 at the Wayback Machine, Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- Grammer, John, 1998, "Fairly Agrarian", Mississippi Quarterly 52.1.
- Quinlan, Kieran, 1999, "John Crowe Ransom" Archived 2008-07-04 at the Wayback Machine, American National Biography. Oxford University Press.
- Tillinghast, Richard, 1997, "John Crowe Ransom: Tennessee's major minor poet", New Criterion 15.6.
External links
- Ransom, John Crowe. "Criticism, Inc.", The Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1937.
- Warren, Robert Penn. "John Crowe Ransom: A Study in Irony", The Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1935.
- Stuart Wright Collection: John Crowe Ransom Papers (#1169-010), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University