John Crowe Ransom; Critical Essays and a Bibliography - hardcover

John Crowe Ransom has been one of the most important and influential men of letters in the twentieth century. He was a dedicated teacher, a key figure among the Nashville Fugitive-Agrarians, a poet, a critic, and an editor. The essays in this collection indicate the development of Ransom's literary reputation and represent some of the many attempts to place him among the important writers of his generation. In his introduction Professor Young discusses the difficulty of assessing Ransom's impact on modern American literature and sets the stage of the essays which follow. Robert Penn Warren, in an early essay which set the pattern for much of the later criticism of Ransom's poetry, observes that one of Ramsom's prevailing themes is that of the "discrepancies between human desires and their fulfillment." Cleanth Brooks elaborates on Warren's thesis. "To an astonishing degree," he writes, "the problems which engage Ransom's attention turn out to be aspects of one situation: that of man's divided sensibility."