John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom was one of the leading poets of his generation. He was a highly respected teacher and critic. Ransom was intimately connected to the early twentieth-century literary movement known as the Fugitives, later the Southern Agrarians. Around the year 1915, a group of Vanderbilt University teachers and students began meeting to discuss trends in American life and literature. They recorded their concerns in a magazine of verse entitled the Fugitive, which, though it appeared little more than a dozen times after the first issue was published in 1922, proved to be in the vanguard of a new literary movement—Agrarianism—and a new way of analyzing works of art—the New Criticism. As one of the group's major spokesmen, John Crowe Ransom
eventually came to be known as the dean of twentieth-century American poets and critics.
Ransom's poems reflected this preoccupation with regionalism and the struggle between reason and sensibility from a thematic as well as a stylistic standpoint. His themes emphasized "man's dual nature and the inevitable misery and disaster that always accompany the failure to recognize and accept this basic truth; mortality and the fleetingness of youthful vigor and grace, the inevitable decay of feminine beauty; the disparity between the world as man would have it and as it actually is, between what people want and need emotionally and what is available for them, between what man desires and what he can get; man's divided sensibilities and the wars constantly raging within him, the inevitable clash between body and mind, between reason and sensibility; the necessity of man's simultaneous apprehension of nature's indifference and mystery and his appreciation of her sensory beauties; the inability of modern man, in his incomplete and fragmentary state, to experience love."
These various dualisms in Ransom's poetry could best be described between the head and the heart—that is, between reason and aesthetic sensibility. Ransom continually sought a balance between the two. 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.
John was born on April 30th, 1888 and he died July 3rd, 1974 at the age of 86.
eventually came to be known as the dean of twentieth-century American poets and critics.
Ransom's poems reflected this preoccupation with regionalism and the struggle between reason and sensibility from a thematic as well as a stylistic standpoint. His themes emphasized "man's dual nature and the inevitable misery and disaster that always accompany the failure to recognize and accept this basic truth; mortality and the fleetingness of youthful vigor and grace, the inevitable decay of feminine beauty; the disparity between the world as man would have it and as it actually is, between what people want and need emotionally and what is available for them, between what man desires and what he can get; man's divided sensibilities and the wars constantly raging within him, the inevitable clash between body and mind, between reason and sensibility; the necessity of man's simultaneous apprehension of nature's indifference and mystery and his appreciation of her sensory beauties; the inability of modern man, in his incomplete and fragmentary state, to experience love."
These various dualisms in Ransom's poetry could best be described between the head and the heart—that is, between reason and aesthetic sensibility. Ransom continually sought a balance between the two. 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.
John was born on April 30th, 1888 and he died July 3rd, 1974 at the age of 86.