John Crowe Ransom Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom was one of the most versatile and significant men of letters of his generation. As poet, Isabel Gambel MacCafrey has written, "he provided a small but accurate mirror of the modern sensibility. In ... [his poems] are reflected the miraculous virtues of contemporary verse at its best. Its combination of delicacy with strength, of fervor with restraint, of elegance with earthiness .... He has been celebrated rightly, as the poet of perilous equilibrium, of dichotomies and ironies, of tension and paradox." Some critics, nevertheless, think his contributions as critic, editor, and teacher were of even greater importance to modern American letters than his poetry. He was, many believe, the most original theoretical literary critic produced in America in the twentieth century. He not only elaborated exciting and perceptive theories of the nature and function of poetry, but he also provided invaluable demonstrations of how poetry is to be read if it is to function as a legitimate means of cognition, if it is to furnish "the kind of knowledge by which we must know what we have arranged we cannot know otherwise." Others point to the fact that Ransom was a teacher of great dedication and skill.

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