American Poet John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)

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John Crowe Ransom (1888- 1974) was an American poet, essayist, social and political theorist, man of letters, and academic. Ransom was the third of four children of a Methodist minister. His family was highly literate, although perhaps not unusually so given that his father was a clergyman. As a child, he read his family's library and engaged his father in passionate discussions. He wrote many books and poems in his life.

Ransom was home schooled until age ten, and entered Vanderbilt University at fifteen, graduating first in his class in 1909. He interrupted his studies for two years, to teach sixth and seventh grades in Taylorsville, Mississippi and Latin and Greek in Lewisburg, Tennessee. After teaching one more year in Lewisburg, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University's Christ Church, 1910-13, where he read The Greats. After one year teaching Latin in the Hotchkiss School, he was appointed to the English department at Vanderbilt in 1914. During the First World War, he served as an artillery officer in France. After the war, he returned to Vanderbilt. In 1920, he married Robb Reavill; they raised three children.

In 1937, Ransom accepted a position at Kenyon College in Ohio. He was the founding editor of the Kenyon Review until he retired from Kenyon in 1959. Ransom has few peers among 20th century American university teachers of humanities; in 1966, Ransom was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His ashes are buried behind the Chalmers Library at Kenyon College.

At Vanderbilt, Ransom was a founding member of the Fugitives, a literary group that included Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Under their influence, Ransom, whose first interest had been philosophy, specifically John Dewey and American pragmatism, began writing poetry. His first volume of poems, Poems about God (1919), was praised by Robert Frost and Robert Graves, but Ransom later declined to republish them, deeming them unrepresentative of his work. His literary reputation is largely based on two collections of poetry, Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Believing he had no new themes upon which to write, his subsequent poetic activity consisted almost entirely of revising ("tinkering", he called it) his earlier poems. Hence Ransom's reputations as a poet is based on the fewer than 160 poems he wrote and published between 1916 and 1927. Despite the brevity of his poetic career and output, he won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1951. His 1963 Selected Poems received the National Book Award the following year. Ransom primarily wrote short poems examining the ironic and unsentimental nature of life, with domestic life being a major theme. Arguably Nashville's greatest author, he was also an Agrarian, and Southern poet. An example of his Southern style is his poem "Janet Waking," which "...mixes modernist with old-fashioned country rhetoric"

Beautifully Janet slept

Till it was deeply morning. She woke then

And thought about her dainty-feathered hen,

To see how it had kept.


              

One kiss she gave to her mother.

Only a small one gave she to her daddy

Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby;

No kiss at all for her brother.


              

"Old Chucky, old Chucky!" she cried,

Running across the world upon the grass

To Chucky's house, and listening. But alas,

Her Chucky had died.


              

It was a transmogrifying bee

Came droning down on Chucky's old bald head

And sat and put the poison. It scarely bled,

But how exceedingly


              

And purply did the knot

Swell with the venom and communicate

It's rigor! Now the poor comb stood up straight

But Chucky did not.


              

So there was Janet

Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen

(Translated far beyond the daughters of men)

To rise and walk upon it.


              

And weeping fast as she had breath

Janet implored us, "Wake her from her sleep!"

And would not be instructed in how deep

Was the forgetful kingdom of death.

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