John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransomwas an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 April 1888
CountryUnited States of America
Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.
And a wandering beauty is a blade out of its scabbard.You know how dangerous, gentlemen of threescore?May you know it yet ten more.
Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.
Or he can work it out as a metrical and formal exercise, but he will be disappointed in its content. The New Year's prospect fairly chills his daunting breast.
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.
But we moderns are impatient and destructive.
It is a miracle of harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things.
Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.