John Crowe Ransom

Abstract

John Crowe Ransom (b. 30 April 1888–d. 3 July 1974) was an American poet, Southern Agrarian, literary critic, and editor of the Kenyon Review, arguably the most influential “little magazine” of the mid-20th century. Educated at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Ransom began writing poetry as a member of the Fugitive group that included Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren and had its own short-lived magazine in the early 1920s. Most of the poems on which his reputation rests—often on love or death, never long, sometimes quirky, and with intermittent archaic wording—are to be found in Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Ransom won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1951 and the National Book Award for his Selected Poems in 1964. Following their Fugitive period, Ransom and his associates moved on to become Agrarians, arguing in their 1930 I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition that the South’s distinctive characteristic was its agrarian culture, separating it from both the capitalist industrial North and Soviet Communism. As an English professor at Vanderbilt where historical studies of literary texts took precedence, Ransom argued and eventually won the cause of the literary critic, a victory that over time changed the hierarchies in the profession at large. The text itself, its structures and images and their complex interrelationship, was what was most important. His 1941 volume of theoretical essays, The New Criticism, made Ransom the quasi founding father—there were many others—of a movement that would dominate the academy for the next three decades. Always fascinated by, but wary of, the sciences as their place within the university increased exponentially, Ransom sought over and over to define the kind of supplementary but equally essential knowledge that poetry offered. As founding editor of the Kenyon Review in 1939 and director of the Kenyon School of English, Ransom exercised enormous influence on both the teaching of literature at American colleges and universities, and on several emerging poets and novelists, most notably Robert Lowell. By the mid-1960s, however, many of Ransom’s critical and social positions had come under challenge, as has his status as a “major minor poet” in several recent critiques. Nevertheless, current studies are also finding overlooked fissures in his poems, and, in the age of digitized textuality, fresh inspiration in his Agrarian and New Critical forays.