John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom (Pulaski, Tennessee, 1888 – Gambier, Ohio, 1974) was a poet, literary critic and university teacher. His name is tied to the New Criticism, the movement that in the middle of the twentieth century focused on close reading of the text itself, which is why he remains central to how English-language literature is studied.

He studied at Vanderbilt and then won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he took a second-class degree in Greats. Before the First World War he was already teaching at Vanderbilt, and during the war he served as an artillery officer in France. After returning, he joined the Fugitives, a group of Southern writers that worked largely as a poetry workshop. There he began writing poems in regular rhyme and meter, with an ironic eye on everyday Southern life. He also contributed to the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand (1930), though he gradually distanced himself from its ideas.

In 1937 he took a post at Kenyon College, where he founded The Kenyon Review and edited it until his retirement in 1959. He trained several generations of critics and poets, among them Robert Lowell, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. His reputation as a poet rests on about 160 poems written between 1916 and 1927, but his lasting contribution is critical: his essays set out principles that his former students later developed.