John Crowe Ransom (April 30, 1888, Pulaski, Tennessee- July 3, 1974, Gambier, Ohio) was an American poet, essayist, social and political theorist, man of letters, and academic. is the 120th day of the year (121st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1888 (MDCCCLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Sunday (click on link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a leap year starting on Friday of the 12-day slower Julian calendar). ... Pulaski is a city in Giles County, Tennessee, United States. ... is the 184th day of the year (185th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar) of the 1974 Gregorian calendar. ... Gambier is a village located in Knox County, Ohio. ... A poet (from the ancient Greek ποιητης, poïêtes (artisan) ; ποιέω, poieō) is a person who writes poetry. ...

Life

Ransom was the third of four children of a Methodist minister. His family was highly literate, although perhaps not unusually so given that his father was a clergyman. As a child, he read his family's library and engaged his father in passionate discussions. He wrote many books and poems in his life. he invented apple pie that day The Methodist movement is a group of denominations of Protestant Christianity. ...

Ransom was home schooled until age 10, and entered Vanderbilt University at 15, graduating first in his class in 1909. He interrupted his studies for two years, to teach sixth and seventh grades in Taylorsville, Mississippi and Latin and Greek in Lewisburg, Tennessee. After teaching one more year in Lewisburg, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University's Christ Church, 1910-13, where he read "The Greats." After one year teaching Latin in the Hotchkiss School, he was appointed to the English department at Vanderbilt in 1914. During the First World War, he served as an artillery officer in France. After the war, he returned to Vanderbilt. In 1920, he married Robb Reavill; they raised three children. Vanderbilt redirects here. ... Year 1909 (MCMIX) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Thursday of the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... Taylorsville is a town located in Smith County, Mississippi. ... Lewisburg is a city in Marshall County, Tennessee, United States. ... Rhodes House in Oxford, designed by Sir Herbert Baker. ... The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford in England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... and of the Christ Church College name Christ Church Latin name Ædes Christi Named after Jesus Christ Established 1546 Sister college Trinity College, Cambridge Dean The Very Revd Christopher Andrew Lewis JCR president Laura Ellis Undergraduates 426 GCR president Tim Benjamin Graduates 154 Location of Christ Church within central Oxford... The Hotchkiss School is an independent, American college preparatory boarding school located in Lakeville, Connecticut. ... “The Great War ” redirects here. ... For other uses, see Artillery (disambiguation). ...

In 1937 Ransom accepted a position at Kenyon College in Ohio. He was the founding editor of the Kenyon Review until he retired from Kenyon in 1959. Ransom has few peers among 20th century American university teachers of humanities; his distinguished students include Donald Davidson, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Andrew Lytle, Allen Tate, Peter Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, E.L. Doctorow and Richard M. Weaver. In 1966, Ransom was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His ashes are buried behind the Chalmers Library at Kenyon College. Year 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Kenyon College is a private liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio, founded in 1824 by Bishop Philander Chase of the The Episcopal Church, in parallel with the Bexley Hall seminary. ... This article is about the U.S. State. ... The Kenyon Review is an American literary journal based in Gambier, Ohio, and established in 1939. ... Donald Grady Davidson (August 8, 1893 - April 25, 1968) was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. ... Photograph of Jarrell in 1956 Randall Jarrell (May 06, 1914 – October 14, 1965), was a United States poet, novelist, critic, childrens author and essayist. ... Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917–September 12, 1977), born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was a highly regarded mid-twentieth-century American poet. ... Andrew Nelson Lytle (1902-December 12, 1995) was an American poet, dramatist, and professor of literature. ... John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 - February 9, 1979) was an American poet, essayist, and social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1943 - 1944. ... People called Peter Taylor include: Peter Taylor (1917-1994), author, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Peter Taylor (born 1956), Australian cricketer Peter Taylor, editor of The Bridge on the River Kwai and winner of the 1957 Academy Award for Film Editing Peter Taylor (born 1953), former winger... Robert Penn Warren Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, and was one of the founders of The New Criticism. ... Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (born January 6, 1931, New York, New York) is a writer who has written several critically aclaimed novels that blend history and social criticism. ... Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr (March 3, 1910 – April 1, 1963) was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. ... American Academy of Arts and Letters is an organization whose goal is to foster, assist, and sustain an interest in American literature, music, and art. ... Kenyon College is a private liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio, founded in 1824 by Bishop Philander Chase of the The Episcopal Church, in parallel with the Bexley Hall seminary. ...

Poet

At Vanderbilt, Ransom was a founding member of the Fugitives, a literary group that included Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Under their influence, Ransom, whose first interest had been philosophy, specifically John Dewey and American pragmatism, began writing poetry. His first volume of poems, Poems about God (1919), was praised by Robert Frost and Robert Graves, but Ransom later declined to republish them, deeming them unrepresentative of his work. His literary reputation is largely based on two collections of poetry, Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Believing he had no new themes upon which to write, his subsequent poetic activity consisted almost entirely of revising ("tinkering", he called it) his earlier poems. Hence Ransom's reputations as a poet is based on the fewer than 160 poems he wrote and published between 1916 and 1927. Despite the brevity of his poetic career and output, he won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1951. His 1963 Selected Poems received the National Book Award the following year. The Fugitives were a group of poets and literary scholars who came together at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee around 1920. ... Donald Grady Davidson (August 8, 1893 - April 25, 1968) was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. ... John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 - February 9, 1979) was an American poet, essayist, and social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1943 - 1944. ... Robert Penn Warren Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, and was one of the founders of The New Criticism. ... John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thoughts and ideas have been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. ... Pragmatism is a philosophic school that originated in the late nineteenth century with Charles Sanders Peirce, who first stated the pragmatic maxim. ... Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. ... Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was an English poet, scholar, and novelist. ... The Bollingen Prize, awarded every two years by the Bollingen Foundation, is a prestigious literary honor bestowed on a poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement. ... Year 1951 (MCMLI) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The National Book Awards is one of the most preeminent literary prizes in the United States. ...

Ransom primarily wrote short poems examining the ironic and unsentimental nature of life, with domestic life being a major theme. Arguably Nashville's greatest author, he was also an Agrarian, and Southern poet. An example of his Southern style is his poem "Janet Waking," which "...mixes modernist with old-fashioned country rhetoric" (Tillinghast 1997). Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy. ... The U.S. Southern states or The South, known during the American Civil War era as Dixie, is a distinctive region of the United States with its own unique historical perspective, customs, musical styles, and cuisine. ...

To highlight the incongruity between a steady rhythm of words and the unsteady moments that make up human existence, Ransom often employed regular meters of the sort once common in the English language tradition, and which he altered as needed to fit the flow of his poems. For example, in his poem "Blue girls," the meter halts the lines to produce a pause at certain moments and to add emphasis. He also occasionally employed archaic diction. In poetry, the meter or metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse. ...

Tillinghast (1997) called Ransom a "major minor poet". A major poet could be expected to labor over great works reminding the audience of his grandeur through sestinas, epics, or a philosophical discovery, whereas a minor poet does not carry such high expectations, and is free to explore simpler subjects purely because they delight him. Ransom knew his poems were minor, and used the opportunity to explore domestic themes and Southern life. Being a minor poet also allowed him to make ironic use of simple diction, playing on the intellectual connotations of words. The sestina is a highly structured form of poetry, invented by the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel the late 12th century. ... For other meanings of epic, see Epic. ...

Criticism

Ransom more or less founded the school of literary criticism known as the New Criticism, which gained its name from his 1941 volume of essays The New Criticism. This school, which dominated American literary thought throughout the middle 20th century, emphasized close reading, and criticism based on the texts themselves rather than on extraneous information. Ransom had argued for more "precise and systematic" analysis of texts in a 1937 essay, "Criticism, Inc." He was critical of several aspects of the movement, however, as well as of poet T. S. Eliot, who became a favorite of other New Critics. Ransom remained an active essayist until his death. A collection of his essays first published in the Kenyon Review was published in 1972. New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. ... In literary criticism, close reading describes the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. ... For other persons named Thomas Eliot, see Thomas Eliot (disambiguation). ... The Kenyon Review is an American literary journal based in Gambier, Ohio, and established in 1939. ...

Agrarian theorist

In 1930, Ransom along with 11 other Southern Agrarians published the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, which bemoaned the tide of modernity that appeared to be sweeping away traditional Southern and American culture. Ransom at first defended the manifesto's assertion that the industrialization of modern society was a dehumanizing force, in various essays influenced by his Agrarian beliefs. In 1936, however, he expressed some doubts about the position, and in 1945 publicly renounced it. It is also curious that in 1937, Ransom moved his career from a Southern university very hospitable to the Southern tradition in letters and social philosophy, to a northern, albeit deeply rural, liberal arts college that was less so. Year 1930 (MCMXXX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display 1930 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Southern Agrarians (also known as the Vanderbilt Agrarians or Nashville Agrarians) were a group of twelve American writers and poets with roots in the Southern United States who joined together to publish an agrarian manifesto, a collection of essays entitled Ill Take My Stand in 1930. ... Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy. ... Modernity is a term used to describe the condition of being related to modernism. ... Year 1945 (MCMXLV) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar). ...

Ransom's abandonment of Agrarianism was foreshadowed by one of his most famous essays, "God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy" (1930), a philosophically informed defense of the stern, "inscrutable" God of the Old Testament as opposed to the permissive Jesus, there equated with modern science. Ransom's "traditionalist" assertions in this essay are overshadowed by its critique and rejection of the (American) religious offerings of his day. This article is about the term God in the context of monotheism and henotheism. ... Topics in Christianity Movements · Denominations · Other religions Ecumenism · Preaching · Prayer Music · Liturgy · Calendar Symbols · Art · Criticism Important figures Apostle Paul · Church Fathers Constantine · Athanasius · Augustine Anselm · Aquinas · Palamas · Luther Calvin · Wesley Arius · Marcion of Sinope Archbishop of Canterbury · Catholic Pope Coptic Pope · Ecumenical Patriarch Christianity Portal This box:      Note: Judaism... This article is about Jesus of Nazareth. ...

References

• Modern American Poetry: John Crowe Ransom.
• Grammer, John, 1998, "Fairly Agrarian," Mississippi Quarterly 52.1.
• Quinlan, Kieran, 1999, "John Crowe Ransom" in American National Biography. Oxford University Press.
• Tillinghast, Richard, 1997, "John Crowe Ransom: Tennessee's major minor poet," New Criterion 15.6.

External links

• John Crowe Ransom at Find A Grave