’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper
Kieran Quinlan
RANSOM, John Crowe (30 Apr. l888-3 July 1974), poet and critic,
was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, the son of John James Ransom, a Methodist minister, and
Ella Crowe. Raised in a strongly religious though also very open-minded household, the
precocious Ransom entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville at age fifteen. Following
graduation in 1909 and a stint as a high school teacher, he went on to study classics as a
Rhodes Scholar at Oxford from 1910 to 1913. Ransom was appointed to an instructorship in
Vanderbilt’s English department in 1914 and, apart from service as an artillery officer in
France during World War I, remained there until his departure for Kenyon College in Ohio
in 1937. In 1920, Ransom married Robb Reavill; the couple had three children.
Ransom’s original interest lay more in philosophy than in literature; his letters from
Oxford to his father express his sympathies with the American pragmatists and with John
Dewey in particular. His growing concern with aesthetic issues, however–such as the need
to give a satisfactory account of the "unknown quality of poetry," its
preference for the imaginative rather than the logical–and his exposure to arguments
about free verse (vers libre) as a member of the Fugitive literary group,
which he joined on returning to Nashville, inspired him to begin writing poetry. The
Fugitives–the other notable members of which were Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert
Penn Warren–had also begun as a philosophically oriented discussion group, but they were
soon meeting regularly to offer sustained criticism of one another’s poems.
Ransom’s first book, Poems about God (1919), was completed during his military
service. He quickly became disillusioned with these early exercises in rustic skepticism,
however, and always refused to have any of the poems republished in subsequent volumes,
though both Robert Frost and Robert Graves had warmly praised his work. Ransom’s mature
style is to be found in the poems that compose Chills and Fever (1924) and Two
Gentlemen in Bonds (1927), which appeared originally in the group’s magazine, The
Fugitive (1922-1925). Although Ransom continued to "tinker" with poetry
throughout his long career, his reputation rests largely on the output of these three
years.
Noted for their metaphysical wit and occasional archaisms, Ransom’s poems are most
frequently short lyrics in which he explores the ironies of human existence as they are
manifested in the domestic scenes of daily life. The death of a small child, for example,
is for him but a dramatic instance of the fate that awaits all of us, heightened by the
incongruity between the energy of new life and the abruptness of its extinction. Thus, in
what may be his best-known poem, "Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter" (1924),
when we encounter the corpse of the little girl we are "sternly stopped" and
"vexed" to see her "lying so primly propped." Ransom typically used
regular meters and seemingly sentimental situations to draw attention to the
irregularities and unsentimentality of life itself.
While he is often referred to as a "major minor poet," Ransom was fully
convinced of the importance of the kind of contribution he had to make: "With a
serious poet each minor poem may be a symbol of a major decision. It is as ranging and
comprehensive an action as the mind has ever tried." By 1927 Ransom had come to
believe that he had exhausted his themes and generally ceased thereafter to compose new
poems. Nevertheless, his poetic work continues to be held in high esteem and, on this
ground alone, his is an assured place in the history of American letters. In 1951, many
years after he had ended his creative activities in this field, Ransom won the Bollingen
Prize for Poetry, and in 1964 he received the National Book Award for his Selected
Poems published the previous year. English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes spoke in 1977 of
Ransom’s best poems as "very final objects…. There is a solid total range of
sensation within the pitch of every word."
The Fugitives had begun as a group much engaged with the intellectual and artistic
problems of the modern world and with an ardent desire to escape the "moonlight and
magnolia" school of southern writing. But attacks on the region by H. L. Mencken and
others during the 1920s–many of them provoked by the Scopes "monkey" trial in
Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925–caused them to rethink their position and to become enamored
for a time of certain forms of southern nationalism. By 1930 they were ready to argue that
the South’s distinctive characteristic was that it was still an agrarian society and that
as such it stood as a bulwark against the industrial materialism and communism of the age.
In I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, a collection of essays
published in 1930 by twelve Southerners, Ransom argued that it was only in an agricultural
society that humanity had a true perception of its place in the universe: as beings
subject to suffering and death; industrialized society tended to dull this sense of human
contingency and so falsified the perception of life.
Ransom defended the arguments presented in the book when they were widely ridiculed and
attacked, but by 1936 he was less certain that a return to an agricultural economy could
save the nation, and by 1945 he had publicly changed his position: "Without
consenting to a division of labor, and hence modern society, we should have not only no
effective science, invention, and scholarship, but nothing to speak of in art." In
fact, even in 1930, Ransom’s ambivalence about modern society was reluctantly expressed in
his famous defense of religion, God without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of
Orthodoxy. There, with considerable ingenuity and knowledge of contemporary philosophy
and science, he argued at length for the need to revive the Old Testament God who would
represent the harshness of the universe as it actually is rather than continue exalting a
gentle Jesus (or his parallels in liberal society–the social reformers) who merely
confirms our complacencies. However, his boo
religion is simply a creation of man and that the modern mind cannot accept many of its
traditional premises; thus the argument, as Ransom himself recognized, finally collapsed
under the weight of its own contradictions.
At Vanderbilt, Ransom was one of the first academics in the United States to legitimize
the position of the poet and critic in English departments, which until then had favored
scholars engaged in philological and historical studies. His experience in the classroom,
and the influence of I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929), persuaded him that
too little attention was being given to the actual texts of poems as opposed to the
biographical and incidental information surrounding their composition. Thus, both his
efforts to correct this deficiency and his philosophical desire to show how poetry could
offer a knowledge not provided by the sciences led him to produce a number of essays on
the nature of poetry, particularly in the years after the demise of his agrarian
interests. In what is probably the best known of these, "Wanted: An Ontological
Critic" (1941), Ransom argued that "the differentia of poetry as discourse is an
ontological one. It treats an order of existence, a grade of objectivity, which cannot be
treated in scientific discourse." Much of his subsequent career was spent attempting
to clarify such ideas, his basic contention being that a poem consists of both structure
(argument) and texture (images) in precarious harmony. Although he always stressed the
limitations of science, Ransom was equally aware that the argument of a poem could not fly
in the face of scientific knowledge, a position he came to assert more and more
insistently in his later essays.
When Ransom moved to Kenyon College in 1937, he was followed by three of his most
distinguished pupils: Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Lowell. The college
president was eager to have him begin a new journal, The Kenyon Review, which
Ransom was to edit from 1939 to 1959. In the Review, one of the most successful of
the little magazines, Ransom frequently published authors and views that were quite at
odds with his own. He also founded the Kenyon School of English, designed to gather
distinguished critics and students together to develop a more critical approach to
literature along the lines he had already outlined, though by no means confined to them.
Ransom’s practice of literary criticism is often termed "New Criticism," and
indeed in 1941 he published a book of essays with that title. Earlier, in "Criticism,
Inc." (1937), he had argued that "Criticism must become more scientific, or
precise and systematic." But Ransom himself was always more the theoretical than
practical critic, and it was left to two former students of Ransom–Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren–to produce the book that is forever associated with the movement: Understanding
Poetry (1938). Ransom in fact quickly became skeptical about the New Criticism,
especially its tendency to over apply the concepts of paradox and irony to literary texts
in order to show their "organic unity" rather than allow for their possible
disharmonies. He was also for many years ambivalent about the work of the New Criticism’s
favorite representative poet, T. S. Eliot, on the grounds of the latter’s excessive
obscurity, philosophically unfounded religiousness, and overall pessimism about the modern
world.
While Ransom is usually regarded as a conservative critic, his mind was in constant
evolution, always willing to change a view once held but no longer persuasive. A man of
quiet disposition and extreme courtesy–but an avid competitor in games and sports of all
kinds–Ransom was a revered and influential teacher. Emphasizing early the harshness of
human existence, in the end he advocated a rather benign skepticism, believing that
"this is the best of all possible worlds" and that we are unlikely to know a
better one.
Following his retirement from teaching and from editorship of the Kenyon Review
in 1959, Ransom remained active in the academic world, writing new essays, constantly (and
perhaps unwisely) revising his early poems, lecturing, and collecting those belated honors
and recognitions that usually grace the closing years of a distinguished literary career.
Toward the end of his life he suffered from a variety of recurring ailments, which
gradually led him into long periods of withdrawal and silence. Ransom died in his sleep at
his home on the Kenyon campus.
Letters and papers pertaining to Ransom are to be found in the Firestone Library of
Princeton University, the Library of Congress, the Yale University Library, the Tennessee
State Library and Archives, the Lily Library of Indiana University, the Chalmers Library
of Kenyon College, the Haverford College Library, the Mona Van Duyn Collection and the
William Jay Smith Collection of the Washington University Libraries, and the Jesse E.
Wills Collection of the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University (which
also houses part of Ransom’s library). Thomas Daniel Young and George Core published Selected
Letters of John Crowe Ransom in 1985. Other books by Ransom include Grace After
Meat (1924), The World’s Body (1938), Selected Poems (1945), and Beating
the Bushes: Selected Essays 1941-1970 (1971). In addition, see Thomas Daniel
Young and John Hindle, Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom (1984). The standard
biography is Gentleman in a Dustcoat (1976), by Thomas Daniel Young, who also
edited, John Crowe Ransom: An Annotated Bibliography (1982). An excellent memoir is
by Ransom’s granddaughter, novelist Robb Forman Dew, "Summer’s End," Mississippi
Quarterly 30 (Winter 1976-1977): 137-54. See also Louise Cowan, The Fugitive
Group: A Literary History (1959); Robert Buffington, The Equilibrist: A Study of
John Crowe Ransom’s Poems, 1916-1963 (1967); Marian Janssen, The Kenyon Review
1939-1970: A Critical History (1990); and Kieran Quinlan, John Crowe Ransom’s
Secular Faith (1989).
From American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Copyright ? 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.