John Crowe Ransom

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in 1941. Photo by Robie Macauley.
Born(1888-04-30)April 30, 1888
DiedJuly 3, 1974(1974-07-03) (aged 86)
Resting placeKenyon College Cemetery, Gambier, Ohio
NationalityAmerican
Alma materVanderbilt University (B.A.)
Christ Church, Oxford (M.A.)
Occupations
  • Educator
  • scholar
  • literary critic
  • poet
  • essayist
EmployerKenyon College
Known forNew Criticism school of literary criticism
PartnerRobb Reavill
AwardsRhodes Scholarship, Bollingen Prize for Poetry, National Book Award

John Crowe Ransom (April 30, 1888 – July 3, 1974) was an American poet, teacher, literary critic, and essayist.

Ransom was born in Pulaski, Tennessee. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1909. Then he went to Oxford University.[1] He was teaching at Vanderbilt around 1915 when a group of students began talking about Ameican life and the writing of that time. This group of young poets, like Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and others, started a magazine called The Fugitive. This began a new movement in Southern writing.[2]

Ransom wrote poetry before 1927. After that, he wrote essays and books about the art of literature. His ideas were about the value of tradition. In 1937 he started teaching at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. He started a literary magazine, The Kenyon Review. In 1941 he published essays about literature in his book The New Criticism. Many important poets were printed in The Kenyon Review. Some of the first ones were John Berryman, Dylan Thomas, Muriel Rukeyser, and Allen Tate. In time it printed poems by John Ashbery, James Dickey, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.[3]

Books[change | change source]

  • Poems About God (1919)
  • Chills and Fever (1924)
  • Grace after Meat (1924)
  • Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927)
  • The World's Body (1938)
  • The New Criticism (1941).
  • God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (1965)

Related pages[change | change source]

References[change | change source]

  1. "About John Crowe Ransom | Academy of American Poets". poets.org. Retrieved 2023-01-30.
  2. "John Crowe Ransom". Poetry Foundation. 2023-01-30. Retrieved 2023-01-30.
  3. Parini and Gwynn (2013). "Ransom, John Crowe". Oxford Reference - The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry. Retrieved January 30, 2023.