Biography Essay

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. . . . 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...