John Crowe Ransom

’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:

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