THE JOHN CROWE RANSOM PAPERS (MSS. 006) Inventory ARRANGED AND DESCRIBED BY CATHERINE ASHLEY VIA 2005 SPECIAL COLLECTIONS JEAN AND ALEXANDER HEARD LIBRARY VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY 419 21ST Avenue South Nashville, TN 37240 615-322-2807 CONTENTS OF INVENTORY Contents Page # Summary 3 Biographical/Historical Note 4-8 Scope and Content Note 9 List of Series and Subseries 10-11 Series and Subseries Descriptions 12-13 Container List 14-33 2 SUMMARY Size 3 linear ft. Geographic United States Locations Inclusive 1908-1976 Dates Bulk 1911-1974 Dates Languages English Summary The Papers of John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), poet, educator, editor, critic, Vanderbilt alumnus (B.A. 1909) and former Vanderbilt faculty member (1914-1937), were acquired by The Jean and Alexander Heard library during the summer of 1988 from collector Stuart T. Wright of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Access No Restrictions Restrictions Copyright Consult Head of Special Collections Stack Locations Manuscripts 3 BIOGRAPHICAL/HISTORICAL NOTE 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 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 s 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, Alec B. Stevenson, William Yandell Elliot, Stanely Johnson and Sidney Mttron 4 Hisrsch; 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 the 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 Fugitive appeared in December, 1925. 5 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 it 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 Gentleman 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 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 later 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 6 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.