Literary Birthday – 30 April – John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom was born on 30 April 1888 and died on 3 July 1974.

John Crowe Ransom Quotes

1. When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
2. 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.
3. For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.
4. But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

John Crowe Ransom was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist, and editor. He was a leading theorist of the Southern literary renaissance that began after World War I. He is considered a founder of The New Criticism school of literary criticism. Ransom’s poetry often dealt with the subjects of self-alienation and death. His Selected Poems (1945; rev. ed., 1969) won a National Book Award.

Image: Robie Macauley (Transfered by Ravit/Original uploaded by Cmacauley), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Crowe_Ransom_1941.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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