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Books by John Crowe Ransom
Selected Poems
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God Without Thunder
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Poems About God
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The New Criticism /
Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom
The Kenyon Critics /
Poems and Essays
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John Crowe Ransom
(1888-1974) Born in Pulaski, Tennessee, John Crowe Ransom
received an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University in
1909 and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and served in
World war I. He became a professor at Vanderbilt and later
taught at Kenyon College, where he founded and edited The
Kenyon Review, and remained there until his retirement in
1959.
Ransom published three slim volumes of highly acclaimed
poetry, but after 1927 principally devoted himself to critical
writing. He was a guiding member of the Fugitives, a group of
writers who were wary of the social and cultural changes they
were witnessing in the South during the early part of the 20th
century. The Fugitives sought to preserve a traditional
aesthetic ideal which firmly rooted in classical values and
forms.
As a critic, he had an enormous influence on an entire
generation of poets and fellow academics, who subscribed to the
doctrines he laid out as the "new criticism." His
ideals were John Donne and the English metaphysical poetry of
the 17th century. He believed in the poetic virtues of irony and
complexity, and the importance of adhering to traditional
prosodic techniques of meter, stanza, and rhyme. His own poems
are marked by irony and a spare classicism, and a concern with
the inevitable decay of all things human. *
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Ransom's interest by 1930 had shifted toward social criticism.
That year appeared
God Without Thunder, the thesis of
which is that western man has suffered a tragic loss or defeat
in surrendering to the modern deity, Science. Through this
surrender God has been deprived of his Thunder, which is his
Mystery. Also in 1930 the volume
I'll Take My Stand was
published "by Twelve Southerners," of whom Ransom was one. This
was a collection of essays in defense of agrarian as opposed to
industrial society. Ransom's latest interest,
literary criticism, is evident in the pages of the Kenyon
Review. He has also written two volumes important in
revealing his conception of what the best poetry should be like.
In 1938 was published The World's Body, in which he argues that
it is the function of poetry to represent the fullness, or
"body," of experience, something which science, with its concern
for the abstract, is incapable of doing. His other collection of
essays
The New Criticism
(1941) examines and undertakes
to evaluate the achievement of four contemporaries: I. A.
Richards, T. S. Eliot. Yvor Winters, and William Empson. It
concludes with Ransom's own statement of preference: "Wanted: An
Ontological Critic." In 1945, he published his rigidly chosen
Selected Poems. Nothing from
Poems About God was
reprinted.
Poems and Essays
appeared in 1955.
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| Bells for John Whiteside's
Daughter There
was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in
her footfall,
It is no wonder that her
brown study
Astonishes us all.
Her wars were bruited in
our high window.
We looked among orchard
trees and beyond,
Where she took arms
against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese, like a
snow cloud
Dripping their snow on
the green grass,
Tricking and stopping,
sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose,
Alas,
For the tireless heart
within the little
Lady with rod that made
them rise
From their noon
apple-dreams, and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the
skies!
But now go the bells,
and we are ready;
In one house we are
sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at
her brown study,
Lying so primly propped.
Source:
The American Tradition in Literature
(1967)
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Mockingbirds at Jerusalem
(poetry
Manuscript)
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 3 April 2010
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