Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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John Crowe Ransom, poet, critic and teacher Litt.D...
...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...
...Criticism. In 1937 Ransom went to tiny, oak-sheltered Kenyon College (enrollment: 500) in Gambier, Ohio. Next month, a few weeks after his 70th birthday, he will retire from teaching. In the 21-year interval Kenyon has become a focus of literary ferment rivaled by few campuses...
...Ransom founded the Kenyon Review, one of the nation's best and healthiest literary quarterlies, used it to develop a new idea for literary criticism. Main tenet of the New Criticism, of which Ransom has been a principal architect: hard analysis of text and texture. When the hard analysis has threatened to degenerate into the myopic picking of microscopic nits. Ransom has kept his perspective, helped the pedants to regain theirs. Among the students and faculty members who have studied and taught at Kenyon: Poet Robert Lovell (Lord Weary's Castle), Poet Randall Jarrell, Novelist Robie Macaulay...