Ransom Harvest

In a nation whose literary life is wedded to the colleges, quiet, courtly Poet John Crowe Ransom has for years been one of literature's most influential college teachers. An ironist of edged eloquence, Ran som has published only a few dozen sharply tooled poems, but they are among the best written in the U.S. this century. A critic of high reputation, he has never allowed his views to fossilize; he can retreat with grace from an untenable position, or with great courtesy flay the hide off a literary wrongdoer.

Courtesy and a decorous spirit--as well as immense poetic acuity--are what Ransom's followers praise him for, and he began early to collect followers. As a young instructor at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University in the early '20s. he be came a founder and chief literary exhibit of a band of Southern poets (Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, et al.) called the Fugitives. A few years older than the others, Ransom led the flight of the Fugitives--from the strictures of the machine age, they explained, to the rural virtue of Southern soil -- but not to Southern romanticism, which Ransom roasted to a clinker. Wrote Tate later: "Gently and always implicitly, [he] referred our young aberrations of mind and manners to an order of courtesy above us all ... He has kept before us the example of a classically educated intelligence . . . He is one of the first poets, in any language." Ransom has written poetry, one critic remarked admiringly, about "everything from Armageddon to a dead hen"; his language is quiet but barbed. Of a dead lady he wrote:

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree

Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,

The delight of her husband, her aunt, an infant of three,

And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills.

Of a live mutt:

Behold! again the ubiquitous hairy dog,

Like a numerous army rattling the battlements

With shout, though it is but his monologue,

With a lion's courage and a bee's virulence

Though he is but one dog.

New Criticism. In 1937 Ransom went to tiny, oak-sheltered Kenyon College (enrollment: 500) in Gambier, Ohio. Next month, a few weeks after his 70th birthday, he will retire from teaching. In the 21-year interval Kenyon has become a focus of literary ferment rivaled by few campuses,

In 1939 Ransom founded the Kenyon Review, one of the nation's best and healthiest literary quarterlies, used it to develop a new idea for literary criticism. Main tenet of the New Criticism, of which Ransom has been a principal architect: hard analysis of text and texture. When the hard analysis has threatened to degenerate into the myopic picking of microscopic nits. Ransom has kept his perspective, helped the pedants to regain theirs. Among the students and faculty members who have studied and taught at Kenyon: Poet Robert Lovell (Lord Weary's Castle), Poet Randall Jarrell, Novelist Robie Macaulay (The Disguises of Love).

New Angles. Ransom will edit the Kenyon Review for another year, then turn it over to 38-year-old Macaulay (Poet Edgar Bogardus, 30, became managing editor last month). Editor Ransom and Protege Macaulay agree on changes; both want more poetry and fiction, fewer critical pieces. Ransom will continue to write criticism, plans at least "a book or two." Last week at Kenyon he made an assessment of U.S. letters: "I have the feeling that every creative epoch is followed by an age of criticism. We are in that age. It is a happy time. In explaining the new literature, critics discover new angles and are led to reappraise old literature. We are all engaged in rereading. For the first time, we have come of age in American literature."

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