John Crowe Ransom | |
|---|---|
 John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in 1941. Photo by Robie Macauley. | |
| Born | April 30, 1888 |
| Died | July 3, 1974 (aged 86) Gambier, Ohio, US |
| Resting place | Kenyon College Cemetery, Gambier, Ohio |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Vanderbilt University (B.A.) Christ Church, Oxford (M.A.) |
| Occupations |
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| Employer | Kenyon College |
| Known for | New Criticism school of literary criticism |
| Partner | Robb Reavill |
| Awards | Rhodes 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. 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.
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.
