World's Body

A Rhodes scholar who went to Oxford University from Vanderbilt University, John Crowe Ransom later taught at Vanderbilt University from 1914 to 1937. While there, he became mentor to a number of individuals, including Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, who later became involved in the New Criticism with Ransom. Professor of poetry at Kenyon College, Ohio, from 1937 to 1958, Ransom founded The Kenyon Review in 1939. He was also one of the seven residents of Nashville, Tennessee, who founded and edited The Fugitive (1922--25) and, according to Louis Untermeyer, "He more than any of the others was responsible for the new awakening of poetry in the South." He won the Academy of American Poets' $5,000 fellowship prize (1962) for his "distinguished poetic achievement." He also won the Bollingen Prize in poetry and the Loines Award for poetry. By writing a handful of lyrics remarkable for their irony and structural tensions, as well as critical essays that praised just these virtues in the name of New Criticism, Ransom had an influence far beyond many of his peers. 020