John Crowe Ransom
From KCpedia
John Crowe Ransom created Kenyon's famed Kenyon Review, a well-known quarterly literary magazine recognized by the international literary community as a quality source of contemporary writing in America. Ransom was himself an acclaimed poet, and acted as senior editor for the Review during his time at Kenyon.
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Biography
John Crowe Ransom was born on April 28, 1888 in Pulaski, Tennessee. After entering Vanderbilt at age 15 in 1903, he took two years off between 1905 and 1907 to teach high school and save money before returning to study the classics and philosophy until his graduation. He earned his degree in 1909, then went on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In 1913 he taught Latin for one year at the Hotchkiss School.
Ransom returned to Vanderbilt, as an English professor, in 1914. In 1921, he served as a founding member of Vanderbilt's later well-known "Fugitive" poetry magazine. He remained at the school, excepting two years in France during World War I, until 1937, when he resigned his post to accept a position at Kenyon.
He and his wife, Robb Reavell Ransom, had three children: Helen, David, and John. Ransom was also a friend of the poet Robert Frost.
Time at Kenyon
His students during his illustrious tenure included Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, James Wright, and E.L. Doctorow. During the 1950s, Ransom's family had a house built behind the Craft Center, where Ransom family members continued to reside after his death. After 20 years as a prominent professor and editor, Ransom took his retirement in 1957. He soon after recorded an interview for the Voices of Kenyon LP, produced for the Alumni Association by physics professor Franklin Miller, Jr.. Ransom read his own poetry for the occasion, commented on it, and answered questions about the beginnings of the Kenyon Review.
On July 3, 1974, Ransom, aged 86 years, passed away in his sleep at his long-time Gambier home. His memorial service was held at the Church of the Holy Spirit on November 1, 1974. Ransom's ashes were interred in the College Cemetery.
Achievements & Awards
Ransom's major works include books of literary criticism such as "The World's Body" (1938) and The New Criticism (1941), and five books of poetry: Poems About God (1919), Chills and Fever (1924), Grace After Meat (1924), Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1926), and Selected Poems (1945). Selected Poems won the 1964 National Book Award in poetry. As late as 1972, two years before his death, Ransom published a collection of essays entitled Beating the Bushes.
Ransom's body of work won him a great deal of critical and professional acclaim. While at Kenyon, Ransom was awarded the Carnegie Professorship of Poetry, was Professor Emeritus, and become Dean of Ohio Poets. In 1951 the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded Ransom the Russell Loines Award in Literature, an elite literary society Ransom had belonged to since his induction in 1947. Later that year he also earned the Bollingen Prize in poetry from Yale University.
In 1958, Ransom was among four American artists to receive the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award, comprising a $1,500 grant. In 1962, Ransom won the $5,000 Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. This was followed, two years later, by the National Book Award's recognition of Selected Poems. Three years after that, in 1967, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him $10,000. In 1968, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences awarded Ransom their annual Emerson-Thoreau Medal, along with a $1,000 prize.
Throughout his career, he also traveled and lectured a fair amount, including presentations at Harvard and the Universities of Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and many others. In 1949, Ransom lead a Writer's Conference at the University of Utah, along with other distinguished writers, including Oscar Williams and Theodore Seuss Geisel (or "Dr. Seuss"). The following year he spoke at The Frick Collection in New York about Keats, and at Cornell, along with friend Robert Frost, about Wordsworth. In 1962, he addressed the National Federation of State Poetry Societies in Cleveland.
Recognition
In 1976, Louisiana State University Press published Thomas Young's biography of Ransom, Gentleman in a Dustcoat, and in 1989 the same company published Defining a Secular Faith: the Pursuit of John Crowe Ransom by Kieran Quinlan. In 1983, Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom, edited by Thomas Daniel Young and John Hindle, came into print. He is featured in Kenyon College -- Its Third Half-Century (Thomas Boardman Greenslade, 1975) and in American Literature and the Academy (Kermit Vanderbilt, 1984). His profile appears in The Oxford Literary Guide to the United States (1982) and the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1986).
On the one hundredth anniversary of Crowe's birth, April 28, 1988, an anonymous donor gave $1 million to establish the John Crowe Ransom Professorship, a fully endowed chair awarded to a distinguished member of the English Department. The prize was first awarded to Professor Galbraith M. Crump. Granddaughter Robb Dew is a published novelist, and her 1981 book Dale Loves Sophie to Death is set in a rural, fictional Ohio town bearing a close resemblence to her hometown, Gambier.
The Kenyon admissions office, Ransom Hall, is named in remembrance of the professor, and sculpted black crows perched on the roof of the hall are an additional pun on his name.
Resources in the Kenyon Archives
- John Crowe Ransom -- collected materials (oversize)
- Greenslade, Thomas Boardman. Kenyon College: Its Third Half Century. Gambier, Ohio: Kenyon College, 1975. KNA Press, Inc. [Find in Kenyon's Library]
