约翰·克洛·兰塞姆

John Crowe Ransom (April 30, 1888 – July 3, 1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist. He was nominated for the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Background

John Crowe Ransom was born on April 30, 1888, in Pulaski, Tennessee. His father, John James Ransom (1853–1934) was a Methodist minister. His mother was Sara Ella (Crowe) Ransom (1859–1947). He had two sisters, Annie Phillips and Ella Irene, and one brother, Richard. He grew up in Spring Hill, Franklin, Springfield, and Nashville, Tennessee. He was home schooled until age ten. From 1899 to 1903, he attended the Bowen School, a public school whose headmaster was Vanderbilt alumnus Angus Gordon Bowen.

He entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville at the age of fifteen, graduating first in his class in 1909. His philosophy professor was Collins Denny, later a Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Ransom interrupted his studies for two years to teach sixth and seventh grades at the Taylorsville High School in Taylorsville, Mississippi, followed by teaching Latin and Greek at the Haynes-McLean School in Lewisburg, Tennessee. After teaching one more year in Lewisburg, he was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. He attended Christ Church, Oxford, from 1910 to 1913, where he read Greats, taking a second class degree.

Career

Ransom taught Latin for one year at the Hotchkiss School alongside Samuel Claggett Chew (1888–1960). He was then appointed to the English department at Vanderbilt University in 1914. During the First World War, he served as an artillery officer in France. After the war, he returned to Vanderbilt. He was a founding member of the Fugitives, a Southern literary group of sixteen writers that functioned primarily as a kind of poetry workshop and 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. The Fugitive Group had a special interest in Modernist poetry and, under Ransom's editorship, started a short-lived but highly influential magazine, called The Fugitive, which published American Modernist poets, mainly from the South (though they also published Northerners like Hart Crane). Out of all the Fugitive poets, Norton poetry editors Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair opined that, "[Ransom's poems were] among the most remarkable," characterizing his poetry as "quirky" and "at times eccentric."

In 1930, alongside eleven other Southern Agrarians, he published the conservative, Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, which assailed the tide of industrialism that appeared to be sweeping away traditional Southern culture. The Agrarians believed that the Southern tradition, rooted in the pre-Civil War agricultural model, was the answer to the South's economic and cultural problems. His contribution to I'll Take My Stand is his essay Reconstructed but Unregenerate which starts the book and lays out the Southern Agrarians' basic argument. In various essays influenced by his Agrarian beliefs, Ransom defended the manifesto's assertion that modern industrial capitalism was a dehumanizing force that the South should reject in favor of an agrarian economic model. However, by the late 1930s he began to distance himself from the movement, and in 1945, he publicly criticized it. He remained an active essayist until his death even though, by the 1970s, the popularity and influence of the New Critics had seriously diminished.

In 1937, he accepted a position at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. He was the founding editor of the Kenyon Review, and continued as editor until his retirement in 1959. In 1966, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.