A John Crowe Ransom Chronology
from Special Collections, Vanderbilt University
1888
John Crowe Ransom was born April 30, in Pulaski, Tennessee, the third of the four children
of John James Ransom (1853-1934) and Sara Ella Crowe Ransom (1859-1947); his siblings were
Annie Phillips, Richard B. (Dick), and Ella Irene (Ellene).
1891-1899
Ransom lived in four Middle Tennessee communities served by his father, a Methodist
minister; Spring Hill, Franklin, Springfield, and Nashville. Educated at home until he was
ten, Ransom entered public school in October, 1898.
1899
In September entered the Bowen School in Nashville. Angus Gordon Bowen, the headmaster,
Ransom wrote many years later, "did more for my ... education than any other
man."
1903
In June he was graduated at the head of his class from Bowen, and in September he entered
Vanderbilt University.
1905-1906
Taught sixth and seventh grades at Taylorsville (Mississippi) High School.
1906-1907
Taught Latin and Greek at the Haynes-McLean School in Lewisburg, Tennessee.
1907-1909
Reentered Vanderbilt; selected for Phi Beta Kappa at the end of his junior year; elected
editor of the Observer, the undergraduate literary magazine, in the spring of 1908;
on June 16, 1909, was graduated from Vanderbilt at the head of his class.
1909-1910
Senior master and co-principal of Haynes-McLean, he taught Latin and Greek to the sixth
form and was chief academic officer of the school.
1910-1913
At Christ Church College, Oxford, as Rhodes scholar; read 'The Greats' (the School of
Literae Humaniores) and in summers traveled extensively in the British Isles and on
the Continent; his degree from Oxford was deemed the 'best of the Seconds.'
1913-1914
Taught Latin at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, where he met and shared
literary ideas with Samuel Claggert Chew, a member of the English department; read English
literature seriously for the first time and began to formulate his ideas on the nature and
function of poetry in conversations with Chew and in letters to his father.
1914-1917
In September, 1914, joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University as instructor of English;
published his first essay, 'The Question of Justice,' in the Yale Review (July,
1915); in the fall of 1914 began a series of informal discussions of philosophy and
literature with a group of students and friends, later known as the Fugitives: Donald
Davidson (the Donald Davidson Papers are also in Special Collections), Alec B. Stevenson,
William Yandell Elliott, Stanley Johnson, and Sidney Mttron Hirsch; summer of 1915 read
his first poem, 'Sunset,' to Davidson; on May 12, 1917, reported with Davidson to
Officers' Training Camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia; during summer read to Davidson some
of the poems later to appear in Poems About God.
1917-1919
Was commissioned in August, 1917, and assigned to Field Artillery Training Base in Saumur,
France; sent to the front as a member of the Fifth Field Artillery in January, 1918; in
April, 1918, reassigned to Saumur as instructor; Alec Stevenson and William Frierson,
later members of the Fugitive group, attended the artillery school while Ransom was an
instructor; on May 13, 1918, sent complete draft of Poems About God to Christopher
Morley, who had been at Oxford with Ransom and who helped him find a publisher, Henry Holt
and Company; upon recommendation of Robert Frost the book was published in spring 1919;
enrolled at the universities of Grenoble and Nancy in spring and summer of 1919 while
awaiting orders to return to the United States for discharge; first poems appeared in
print: 'One Who Rejected Christ,' Independent (July 27, 1918); 'Roses,' Contemporary
Verse (December, 1918); 'Darkness' and 'Under the Locusts,' Independent (June
28, 1919); at Nancy first saw copies of Poems About God.
1919-1925
Arrived in New York in mid-August, uncertain of future plans; explored possibility of
career in publishing in New York or in teaching in an eastern university; arrived in
Nashville in late August and decided to return to Vanderbilt to be near aging parents; in
the fall of 1919 Fugitive group met at home of Sidney Hirsch's brother-in-law, James M.
Frank, at 3802 Whitland Avenue; in January, 1920, met Robb Reavill of Denver, Colorado to
whom he was married on December 22, 1920; in November, 1921, Allen Tate began attending
Fugitive meetings and discussions of the group, which soon were almost exclusively
concerned with poems written by its members; daughter Helen born January 17, 1922; in
April, 1922, the first of nineteen issues of The Fugitive appeared (most of
Ransom's best poetry was published in this little periodical); in 1922 began
correspondence with Robert Graves; review of The Waste Land, to which Tate
responded, appeared in Literary Review (July 14, 1923); in spring of 1923 Tate
brought Robert Penn Warren to Fugitive meeting; during 1923 published twenty-one poems,
all but three in The Fugitive; a son, Reavill, was born September 14, 1923; Chills
and Fever was accepted by Alfred Knopf in May, 1924, and a few weeks later, with
assistance from T.S. Eliot, Graves convinced Hogarth to bring out Grace After Meat
in England; received serious consideration for Pulitzer prize in poetry, which went to
Edwin Arlington Robinson, in 1924; Ransom's first serious critical essays appeared in The
Fugitive: 'Mixed Modes' (March, 1925); 'Thoughts on the Poetic Discontent' (June,
1925); 'A Doctrine of Relativity' (September, 1925); the last issue of The Fugitive
appeared in December, 1925.
1926-1930
Spent leave from Vanderbilt during fall of 1925 composing a book-length manuscript on the
nature and function of poetry, entitled 'The Third Moment,' and later destroyed because it
was "hopelessly abstract"; a detailed summary of the ideas he hoped to include
in this manuscript is included in letter to Tate (September 5, 1926); in January, 1927, Two
Gentlemen in Bonds appeared and was hailed by reviewers as a major achievement by one
of the most important poets of the era; promoted to professor of English at Vanderbilt in
June, 1927; in 1926 his correspondence with Tate turned from discussion of literary theory
toward the concepts of society and culture presented in I'll Take My Stand (1930)
to which Ransom contributed the introduction and an essay; at work, beginning in 1928, on God
without Thunder (1930); published 'Classical and Romantic,' on September 14, 1929, an
essay in which he outlined the basic thesis of The World's Body (1938); 1927-1930:
the discussions resulting in I'll Take My Stand occurred; in 1930-1931 Ransom
engaged in a series of public debates with Stringfellow Barr, William S. Knickerbocker,
and William D. Anderson on the principles of Agrarianism.
1931-1940
The Ransoms spent the academic year 1931-1932 in England on Guggenheim fellowship; Ransom
published 'The State and the Land' (New Republic, February, 1932) and 'Land! An
Answer to the Unemployment Problem' (Harper's, July, 1932); began work on essays to
appear in The World's Body and published first two: 'A Poem Nearly Anonymous' and
'A Poem Nearly Anonymous: A Poet and His Formal Tradition' in May and September, 1933;
published 'Modern with the Southern Accent' (April, 1935) and 'What Does the South Want?'
(April, 1936) in the Virginia Quarterly Review; the latter is Ransom's contribution
to the second Agrarian symposium, Who Owns America? (1936); his son John James
(called Jack) born April 12, 1935; left Vanderbilt to become professor of poetry at Kenyon
College in Gambier, Ohio, in September, 1937; published 'Shakespeare at Sonnets' in Southern
Review (Winter, 1938); The World's Body appeared from Scribner's in late winter
1938; during winter of 1937-1938 began discussions with Gordon Chalmers, president of
Kenyon, about publication of a review; first issue of Kenyon Review appeared in
January, 1939; began work on The New Criticism in summer of 1938 and published
first essay to appear in the book in Southern Review in winter 1939; became
Carnegie professor of poetry at Kenyon in spring 1939 and declined offer to become
chairman of the English department of the Woman's College of North Carolina at Greensboro.
1941-1950
The New Criticism appeared from New Directions, in spring of 1941; in spring of
1942 Southern Review (old series) was discontinued, and the Kenyon Review
took over 'all unexpired subscriptions'; during 1944 and 1945, with the assistance of
Doubleday, Doran and Company, the Kenyon Review offered a first prize of $500 and a
second prize of $250 for the best short stories 'submitted by a writer who has not
published a book of stories'; Selected Poems appeared from Knopf in spring of 1945
and reviews indicate Ransom's reputation as a poet was already firmly established; from
1945 to 1945 the Rockefeller Foundation supported a series of Kenyon Review
fellows; from 1948 through 1950 this foundation supported the Kenyon School of English,
which had on its faculty the most celebrated writers and critics of the time and attracted
to Gambier many returning veterans and other students seriously interested in the study of
literature; on December 30, 1947, Ransom became a member of the National Institute of Arts
and Letters; the summer 1948 issue of the Sewanee Review was devoted to 'a tribute
to Ransom on his sixtieth birthday'; Ransom spent the academic year 1949-1950 as visiting
professor at Indiana University.
1951-1959
In the summer of 1951 the Kenyon School of English moved to Indiana University and became
the School of Letters; on January 22, 1951, he received the Bollingen prize in poetry for
1950 and a few weeks later the Russell Loines Award in Literature from the National
Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1951 Ransom edited, with introduction, The Kenyon
Critics; from 1953 to 1955 Kenyon Review offered a fellowship each year to a
poet, a writer of fiction, and a critic; among those receiving these awards were Irving
Howe, Flannery O'Connor, W.S.Merwin, R.W.B. Lewis, Howard Nemerov and Richard Ellman; the
fellowships were renewed for 1956-1958 and attracted, among others, Delmore Schwartz,
James Wright, Andrew Lytle, J.F. Powers, Elizabeth Spencer, Leslie Fiedler, and Francis
Fergusson; Ransom taught at School of Letters three summers: 1952, 1954 and 1958;
published two of his most important critical essays in the mid-1950s, both in the Kenyon
Review: 'The Concrete Universal: Observations on the Understanding of Poetry, I'
(Autumn, 1954) and 'The Concrete Universal: Observations on the Understanding of Poetry,
II' (Summer, 1955); on January 13, 1956 he presented 'New Poets and Old Muses,' as one of
the Gertrude Clarke Whittal poetry lectures at the Library of Congress; returned to
Vanderbilt for the Fugitives' reunion May 3-5, 1956; became honorary consultant in
American literature for the Library of Congress; received the Creative Arts Committee
Award in Poetry from Brandeis University on January 28, 1958; retired from teaching in the
spring of 1958 and from the editorship of the Kenyon Review in the spring of 1959.
1960-1974
Visiting professor at Northwestern University for the winter term, 1960; participant in
Vanderbilt Literary Symposium on April 20-21; returned to Vanderbilt as visiting
professor, fall 1960; on December 4, 1962, received $5,000 award from the Academy of
American Poets for distinguished poetic achievement; in April, 1963, a new edition of Selected
Poems appeared; John Crowe Ransom: A Tribute from the Community of Letters
appeared; and the spring issue of Shenandoah was a 'Tribute to John Crowe Ransom on
His Seventy-Fifth Birthday'; the Kenyon Review sponsored a symposium on the
subject: 'Quo Vadimus? Or the Books Still Unwritten,' with Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren,
Robert Lowell, Robie Macauley, and Stephen Spender as participants; published essay on
Wallace Stevens in Kenyon Review (Winter, 1964); in winter of 1964 made extended
trip to California; on March 10, 1964, received National Book Award for Selected Poems
(1963); wrote essay on 'Gerontion' for Sewanee Review (Spring, 1966); on December
16, 1966, elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in July,
1966, received $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts, an award made to a small
number of 'distinguished senior American writers'; on April 28, 1967, Martin College in
Pulaski, Tennessee, gave a dinner honoring Ransom on his eightieth birthday; with other
Agrarians participated, in mid-April, 1968, in Southern Literary Festival at the
University of Dallas; a dinner was held in his honor at Kenyon on April 30, 1968, at which
Allen Tate was the principal speaker; a third edition of Selected Poems appeared in
April, 1968, and The World's Body, with a lengthy postscript, was reissued by
Louisiana State University Press at the same time; on May 9, 1968, received
Emerson-Thoreau Medal and an award of $1,000 from the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences; made last public appearance at Kenyon College on February 27, 1973, in
presenting Robert Penn Warren, who was in Gambier to read his poetry; his poem 'Four
Threesomes or Three Foursomes' appeared in Sewanee Review for summer 1973; died in
his sleep in Gambier, Ohio on July 3, 1974; was cremated, and his ashes buried behind the
Chalmers Library on the Kenyon College campus.
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