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John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974) was a teacher, poet, founder of the Kenyon Review, and a father of the New Criticism. From 1937 to 1959, Ransom served as a professor at Kenyon College and his distinguished students included Donald Davidson, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Andrew Lytle, Allen Tate, Peter Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, and E. L. Doctorow.

Author

Criticism, Inc

It is strange, but nobody seems to have told us what exactly is the proper business of criticism. There are many critics who might tell us, but for the most part they are amateurs. So have the critics nearly always been amateurs; including the best o [...]

What Does the South Want?

It is my impression that Southerners do not have inhibitions against speaking up, and that what they like to speak about is the South. They now seem to concede that the South is a member part of an organic Union, and that in this relation will come w [...]

The Psychologist Looks at Poetry

Mr. I. A. Richards is a British psychologist devoted to a very special career, which is the application of his science to poetry. He has certainly improved the public reception of poetry, but it does not follow that he has yet perfected the ap [...]

Art and Mr. Santayana

Among philosophical personalities probably the most urbane and humanistic since Socrates is Mr. Santayana. I imagine he is what Emerson might have been if Emerson had had a philosophical instead of a theological background; in other words, if his Har [...]

Modern with the Southern Accent

The literary procession in this country sometimes occurs to us as moving as fast as it can, and keeping well away from the beaten road. The South, therefore, reputed to be not merely slow but positively backward, must have had moments of vainglory, o [...]

Criticism, Inc.

It is strange, but nobody seems to have told us what exactly is the proper business of criticism. There are many critics who might tell us, but for the most part they are amateurs. So have the critics nearly always been amateurs; including the best [...]