Ransom, John Crowe, 1888–1974, American poet and critic, b. Pulaski, Tenn., grad. Vanderbilt Univ. and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is considered one of the great stylists of 20th-century American poetry. His verse, elegant and impersonal, is concerned with the breakdown of traditional order and stability in the modern world. His first volume of verse, Poems about God, appeared in 1919. It was followed by Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1926). He taught at Vanderbilt from 1914 to 1937, during which time he (with Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others) founded and edited the Fugitive (1922–25), a bimonthly literary magazine. One of the so-called new critics, he brought to 20th-century criticism a new respect for poetry as a medium, emphasizing close textual analysis and the importance of a poem as a poem. From 1937 to 1958 he taught at Kenyon College; there he founded the Kenyon Review, a magazine that established him as an influential and controversial critic and editor. In The World's Body (1938) and The New Criticism (1941) he voices his literary theories.

Bibliography

See the revised and enlarged edition of his Selected Poems (1969) and Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays 1941–1970 (1972). See his letters, ed. by T. D. Young (1985); biography by T. D. Young (1976); study by K. Quinlan (1989).

Ransom, John Crowe

(born April 30, 1888, Pulaski, Tenn., U.S.—died July 4, 1974, Gambier, Ohio) U.S. poet and critic. Ransom attended and later taught at Vanderbilt University, where he became the leader of the Fugitives, a group of poets who shared a belief in the South and its agrarian traditions and published the influential journal The Fugitive (1922–25); he was among those Fugitives called Agrarian who contributed to I'll Take My Stand (1930). At Kenyon College, he founded and edited (1939–59) the Kenyon Review. His literary studies include The New Criticism (1941), which gave its name to an important critical movement (see New Criticism), and he became recognized as a leading theorist of the post-World War I Southern literary renaissance. His Selected Poems (1945; rev. ed., 1969) won the National Book Award.

Ransom, John Crowe (1888–1974) literary critic, poet, educator; born in Pulaski, Tenn. He was educated at Vanderbilt and Oxford Universities. While teaching at Vanderbilt (1914–37), he joined the Fugitive group of southern writers, founded Fugitive, and wrote most of the poetry that was to spark the southern literary renaissance and win the Bollingen Poetry Prize (1951). Even more influential as a critic, in The New Criticism (1941) and later essays, Ransom advanced a critical practice based on close textual analysis that was to dominate American universities for 30 years. He became closely identified with Kenyon College as a professor of poetry (1937–58; his students included Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren and numerous other poets and critics) and as editor of the Kenyon Review (1939–58).