John Crowe Ransom

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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 New Criticism school of literary criticism.

As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review.

Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist.

Personal life and death

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

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

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Career

During Samuel Claggett Chew's time at the Hotchkiss School, Ransom taught Latin for a year (1888-1960). He was then promoted to the English department of Vanderbilt University in 1914. He served in France as an artillery officer during the First World War. He returned to Vanderbilt after the war. He was a founding member of the Fugitives, a Southern literary group of sixteen writers that existed primarily as a poetry workshop and included Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Ransom, who had first concern had been philosophy (specifically John Dewey and American pragmatism), began writing poetry under their influence. Robert Frost and Robert Graves praised his first collection of poems, Poems about God (191919). The Fugitive Group had a keen interest in Modernist poetry and launched The Fugitive, a short-lived, but highly influential magazine that published American Modernist poets, mainly from the South (although they also published Northerners like Hart Crane). Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair were among the most notable writers of Fugitive poetry, with his poetry described as "quirky" and "at times eccentric."

I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, a conservative Agrarian tradition, which demolished traditional Southern culture in 1930. The Agrarians believed that the Southern tradition, which was embedded in the pre-Civil War agricultural system, was the solution to South's economic and cultural challenges. His essay Reconstructed but Unregenerate, which opens the book and lay out the Southern Agrarians' basic argument, is his contribution to I'll Take My Stand. Ransom defended the manifesto's argument that modern industrial capitalism was a dehumanizing power that the South should reject in favour of an agrarian economic model in several essays influenced by his Agrarian convictions. However, he began to distance himself from the movement in the late 1930s, and in 1945, he openly condemned it. Nevertheless, he continued to write until his death, even though the New Critics' fame and esteem had significantly diminished by the 1970s.

He accepted a professorship at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 1937. He was the founding editor of the Kenyon Review and served as editor until his departure in 1959. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1966.

He had few peers among twentieth-century American university teachers of humanities; among his outstanding students were Donald Davidson, Randall Jarrell, George Lanning, Robert Lowell, Allen Lytle, Robie Macauley, Robert Abbott, E.L. Patrides, Richard M. Weaver, James Wright, E.R. Patrides, and Constantinos Patrides (himself a Rhodes Scholar). His literary reputation is based principally on two collections of poetry, Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). His subsequent literary endeavor, although he had no new topics to write, consisted largely of revising ("tinkering" his older poems. Hence, Ransom's reputation as a poet is based on the fact that he wrote and published fewer than 160 poems between 1916 and 1927. Randall Jarrell, a poet and former Ransom scholar, wrote an essay in which he lauded Ransom's poetry in 1963.

Ransom received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1951, despite the brevity of his poetic career and output. The National Book Award was given to his 1963 Selected Poems the following year.

He primarily wrote short poems examining the unpleasant and unentimental aspects of life (with domestic life in the American South being a major focus). "Janet Waking," an example of his Southern style, "mixes modernist with old-fashioned country rhetoric." He was described as a strict formalist, with regular rhyme and meter in almost all of his poems. He also used archaic diction on occasion. "[Ransom] defends formalism because he sees it as a check on bluntness, which is a mark of brutality," Ellman and O'Clair emphasizes. Poetes simply rape or murder their victims, without formalism, he claims.

He was a leading figure of literary criticism at the New Criticism school, which gained its name from his 1941 volume of essays The New Criticism. The New Critical Theory, which dominated American literary thought throughout the twentieth century, emphasized close reading and analysis based on the texts themselves rather than on non-textual bias or non-textual history. "Criticism, Inc.," Ransom's seminal 1937 essay, laid out his ideal literary criticism, "criticism must become more scientific, precise, and systematic." To this end, he argued that personal reactions to literature, historical scholarship, linguistic scholarship, and what he called "moral studies" should not influence literary interpretation. He also argued that literary commentators should see a poem as an aesthetic object. Many of the ideas he discussed in this essay will play a vital role in The New Criticism's evolution. "Criticism, Inc." and a few of Ransom's other academic papers lay out some of the main points that the New Critics would build on. Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, among other key terms that were later used to describe the New Criticism, had a bigger hand in initiating many of the key terms (such as "close reading").

In 1951, the Russell Loines Award for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters was given to him.

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