RANSOM, JOHN CROWE

born April 30, 1888, Pulaski, Tenn., U.S. died July 4, 1974, Gambier, Ohio American poet and critic, leading theorist of the Southern literary renascence that began after World War I. Ransom's The New Criticism (1941) provided the name of the influential mid-20th-century school of criticism (see New Criticism). Ransom was educated at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and from 1914 to 1937 he taught English there, where he was the leader of the Fugitives (q.v.), a group of poets that published the influential literary magazine The Fugitive (192225) and shared a belief in the South and its regional traditions. Ransom was also among those Fugitives who became known as the Agrarians. Their I'll Take My Stand (1930) criticized the idea that industrialization was the answer to the needs of the South. Ransom taught from 1937 until his retirement in 1958 at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, where he founded and edited (193959) the literary magazine The Kenyon Review. Ransom's literary studies include God Without Thunder (1930); The World's Body (1938), in which he takes the position that poetry and science furnish different but equally valid knowledge about the world; Poems and Essays (1955); and Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays, 19411970 (1972). Ransom's poetry is collected in Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Thereafter he published only five poems; his Selected Poems (1945; rev. ed., 1969), which won a National Book Award, contained revisions of his earlier work. T.D. Young edited his critical essays (1968). Additional reading Thomas Daniel Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom (1976); Kieran Quinlan, John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith (1989).