Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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John Crowe Ransom says that Jarrell wore a "triple crown"-"a pure Pity, an embracing Weltschmerz, and a wry ironic Wit." The pity sometimes seemed absent from his own reviews. Alfred Kazin recalls a sideswipe in which Jarrell wrote that some crypto poet's work had "hidden treasures," but that finding them was "like looking for the gold in sea water." This sort of wit provided the sparkle to his otherwise brackish novel, Pictures from an Institution...
Heady Summer. Tennessee in the '30s was the center of a poetic renaissance. Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, fathers of the "New Criticism," had done much to impose form and coherence on the gaseous and self-indulgent free-verse fashion of the time. Thus Lowell at 20 found himself at a reform school-poetic reform. When he arrived "ardent and eccentric...
...returned to Cambridge to muddle through a bit more and, although it seemed impious to his parents for a Lowell to reject Harvard, he was allowed to transfer to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where Ransom and Randall Jarrell now taught. They were to make the Kenyon Review into a dominant force in American poetry and criticism for the next three decades. "I am the sort of poet I am because...
...heavy burden of learning and the rigorous formal demands of the New Criticism of Ransom and Tate dammed up the first freshet of his verse. His poems were blocked with a deliberate opaque quality, as if he feared that clarity were a sign of mediocrity. Still, he seemed stimulated by restraint. He emerged from Kenyon summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and class valedictorian. He also emerged a Roman Catholic convert and a husband...
Political Abduction? Thompson's friends, who include former OSS agents (Thompson first came to Thailand when working for the OSS) and other men with experience in intelligence work, feel that he could have been kidnaped for a ransom not yet demanded. But they lean toward the belief that he was abducted for political motives. What political motives? They are not sure, but feel that he may be the prisoner of Communists who wish to use him as some sort of intermediary or in a propaganda ploy. They point out, for example, that Thompson knew many of Ho Chi Minh...