Books by John Crowe Ransom

Selected Poems  / God Without Thunder /  Poems About God  / The New Criticism  / Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom

The Kenyon Critics  /  Poems and Essays

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John Crowe Ransom

(1888-1974)

Born in Pulaski, Tennessee, John Crowe Ransom received an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University in 1909 and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and served in World war I. He became a professor at Vanderbilt and later taught at Kenyon College , where he founded and edited The Kenyon Review, and remained there until his retirement in 1959.

Ransom published three slim volumes of highly acclaimed poetry, but after 1927 principally devoted himself to critical writing. He was a guiding member of the Fugitives, a group of writers who were wary of the social and cultural changes they were witnessing in the South during the early part of the 20th century. The Fugitives sought to preserve a traditional aesthetic ideal which firmly rooted in classical values and forms.

As a critic, he had an enormous influence on an entire generation of poets and fellow academics, who subscribed to the doctrines he laid out as the "new criticism." His ideals were John Donne and the English metaphysical poetry of the 17th century. He believed in the poetic virtues of irony and complexity, and the importance of adhering to traditional prosodic techniques of meter, stanza, and rhyme. His own poems are marked by irony and a spare classicism, and a concern with the inevitable decay of all things human.

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Ransom's interest by 1930 had shifted toward social criticism. That year appeared God Without Thunder, the thesis of which is that western man has suffered a tragic loss or defeat in surrendering to the modern deity, Science. Through this surrender God has been deprived of his Thunder, which is his Mystery. Also in 1930 the volume I'll Take My Stand was published "by Twelve Southerners," of whom Ransom was one. This was a collection of essays in defense of agrarian as opposed to industrial society.

Ransom's latest interest, literary criticism, is evident in the pages of the Kenyon Review. He has also written two volumes important in revealing his conception of what the best poetry should be like. In 1938 was published The World's Body, in which he argues that it is the function of poetry to represent the fullness, or "body," of experience, something which science, with its concern for the abstract, is incapable of doing. His other collection of essays The New Criticism (1941) examines and undertakes to evaluate the achievement of four contemporaries: I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot. Yvor Winters, and William Empson. It concludes with Ransom's own statement of preference: "Wanted: An Ontological Critic." In 1945, he published his rigidly chosen Selected Poems. Nothing from Poems About God was reprinted. Poems and Essays  appeared in 1955.

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Source: The American Tradition in Literature (1967)