Word: ransoming
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...nation whose literary life is wedded to the colleges, quiet, courtly Poet John Crowe Ransom has for years been one of literature's most influential college teachers. An ironist of edged eloquence, Ran som has published only a few dozen sharply tooled poems, but they are among the best written in the U.S. this century. A critic of high reputation, he has never allowed his views to fossilize; he can retreat with grace from an untenable position, or with great courtesy flay the hide off a literary wrongdoer...
Courtesy and a decorous spirit-as well as immense poetic acuity-are what Ransom's followers praise him for, and he began early to collect followers. As a young instructor at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University in the early '20s. he be came a founder and chief literary exhibit of a band of Southern poets (Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, et al.) called the Fugitives. A few years older than the others, Ransom led the flight of the Fugitives-from the strictures of the machine age, they explained, to the rural virtue of Southern soil...
...with a kind of horror that the modern reader finds an appalling crime described in a debased Tom Swift idiom. Writes Leopold: "Dick was in high spirits . . . 'That'll be a snap. Nate. Nothing to it.' " Says Loeb to Leopold, as they are planning to collect ransom for Bobby Franks: "Hey, this is neat, Nate-hey, I'm a poet!" When headlines announce: BODY OF BOY FOUND IN SWAMP, Loeb asks: "What'cha think, Nate? When are these damn papers printed?" Leopold replies: "Hell, I don't know. Couple of hours...
...acres for the Northern Illinois Toll Highway, including fox-hunting runs and part of one of his eleven polo fields. He got $2,000,000, considered that hardly adequate for a stretch of choice land. In the Los Angeles suburb of Westchester, Aircraft Mechanic Roger Ransom will probably lose the back tenth of his lot to the San Diego Freeway. He has been offered $900, considers that hardly adequate for the spot where his orchard was going to grow. Some 15 miles west of Santa Rosa, N.Mex., on widening Highway 66, Moises Lucero lost the bar, gas station and dance...
What the North Koreans were up to soon became clear. The U.N.'s armistice negotiations chief. Major General Olaf Keyster, demanded and got a Panmunjom session, received an answer to demands for return of the plane and passengers that was understandable as a ransom note: difficulties would be smoothed over if South Korea would recognize North Korea officially (which it has always refused to do) by entering into direct negotiations for the missing DC-3. As huge mobs of outraged Seoul citizens yelled for action, the answer came from explosive South Korean President Syngman Rhee: "No!" By early this...