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).

Mentioned in

Jarrell, Randall

References in periodicals archive

Eliot, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and R.

Problems of scale in "Close" and "Distant" reading

(85.) John Crowe Ransom, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).

The Catholicity of beauty

Would you see God, see me' Without question, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate had similar beliefs.

A comparative study of two American cultural Renaissances

Saved by John Crowe Ransom, the founder of the Kenyon Review himself, the poet, critic, teacher, and editor, saved by his asking plaintively why wouldn't I leave Red Warren alone and go on about my business.

Fugitive Days

Empson's model also affords a way of considering the irony in the so-called minor verse of John Crowe Ransom such as "Bells for John Whiteside's daughter", "Winter remembered", "Vaunting oak", "Eclogue", and "Janet waking" (all poems published in the 1920s).

"Cold pastoral": irony and the eclogue in the poetry of the southern fugitives

In this regard, it is worth remembering that John Crowe Ransom, the justly famous editor of Kenyon Review, extended a welcoming hand to Howe early in his career--not only helping him get a post at the Indiana School of Letters, but also printing many of the pieces that would later be collected in Politics and the Novel (1957).

Irving Howe and the literary criticism that matters

At times sounding like a list of social engagements, Professor McAlexander nonetheless has engaged the reader in the small family of literary notables personifying a pivotal era of American letters: Randall ]arrell, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Hubert H. McAlexander. Peter Taylor: a Writer's Life

And Allen Tate--who along with John Crowe Ransom would comprise Warren's primary influences among the Fugitive poets--remembers that Warren had covered his dormitory room walls with murals depicting scenes from Eliot's poem (see Cowan 108-09).

The conservative aesthetic of Warren's early poetry

Agrarianism's manifesto, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), was written by "Twelve Southerners," including poet-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, and novelist-poet-critic Robert Penn Warren.

The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought. (Arts and Letters)

Donoghue takes as his theme the plight of the literary imagination after the collapse of myth--the very problem that nagged the principal architects of high modernism: Yeats, Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate among others.

Adam's Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature. (Shorter Notices)

Richards, John Crowe Ransom, and others--saw reading as an act of uncovering a meaning that was objective and safely implanted in the work.

RELIGION, POLITICS, and the Fear of Whole Language Education