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John
Crowe Ransom, born in Pulaski, Tennessee the son of a Methodist
minister, was raised in a strongly religious though also very
open-minded household. He enrolled at Vanderbilt University when he was
only fifteen. He graduated in 1909. From 1910 – 1912 he was a Rhodes
Scholar at Oxford.
While at Oxford, Ransom's letters to his father expressed an interest in
philosophy more than in literature. He was particularly interested in
John Dewey and other American pragmatists.
When
he returned he was appointed to an instructorship in Vanderbilt's
English department in 1914 and, apart from service during World War I,
remained there until 1937 when he joined the faculty at Kenyon College
in Ohio. In 1920, Ransom married Robb Reavill. They had three children.
He
published three volumes of highly acclaimed poetry, but after 1927
principally devoted himself to critical writing. He was a leading member
of the Fugitives, a group of writers concerned with the social
climate of change they were witnessing in the South during that time.
The Fugitives sought to preserve a traditional aesthetic ideal which was
firmly rooted in classical values and forms.
Ransom had a great deal of influence on a generation of poets and
fellow academics, who subscribed to the doctrines he laid out as the
"New Criticism." He believed in the poetic virtues of irony and
complexity, and the importance of adhering to traditional techniques of
meter, stanza, and rhyme. His poetry strongly reflects these values as
well as a concern with the inevitable decay of all things human.
He died in 1974.
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