Ransom, John Crowe

Ransom, John Crowe (1888–1974), Tennessee poet, was educated in his native state and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1913). He was a member of the English department of Vanderbilt University (1914–37) and early became a leader of the Agrarians and an editor of The Fugitive In 1937 he joined the faculty of Kenyon College, where he remained until retiring in 1958. He founded and edited the Kenyon Review, placing stress on the New Criticism more than on the regionalism that he formerly emphasized. His first verse, Poems About God (1919), although not sufficiently valued by him for selection in later volumes, was already marked by the irony that is more accomplished in Chills and Fever (1924). Grace After Meat (1924) is an English selection from these two books, which was followed by Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). His balanced judgment of opposites and his portraits of people in his elegies are distinguished by a witty and oblique style. His Selected Poems (1945) was issued in revised, enlarged editions (1963, 1969). His criticism appears in God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (1930), an attack on science as destructive of the old mystery of God, a theme to which he returned in The World's Body (1938), on the failure of science to achieve the body that is in poetry; and he gathered later essays in Beating the Bushes (1972). He contributed to the Agrarian anthology I'll Take My Stand (1930), and later analyzed contemporaries and called for an ontological critic in The New Criticism (1941).