Un-Gyve Press to Publish Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom

BOSTON, Sept. 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/

Of the tread of the dark wood mold and turfy rye,
Rich smell of horse in his nostril, wind in his eye,
	fromIn Air, John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom(1888-1974), poet, critic, and teacher was born in Pulaski, Tennessee. He entered Vanderbilt University at the age of fifteen, received his undergraduate degree in 1909, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and crowned his academic career at Kenyon College where he founded and edited the Kenyon Review. His criticism The New Criticism was revered and feared. His poems are at once ancient and modern while never modernist (T.S. Eliot: "I have probably a higher opinion of your verse than you have of mine"). They won high esteem and deep delight for their fineness, their humor, their individuality of manner and movement, and their unforced poignancy.Poems About God(1919),Chills and Fever(1924), andTwo Gentlemen in Bonds(1927) led in due course to hisSelected Poems(1947), of which the revised reissue was to win the National Book Award in Poetry in 1964.

Robert Graves: "The sort of poetry which, because it is too good, has to be brushed aside as a literary novelty".

Howard Nemerov: "His verse is in the best sense 'private', the judgment upon the world of one man who could not, properly speaking, be imitated".

Robert Lowell: "so many lyrics that one wants to read over and over".

So many? But there exists a greater yield than was preserved by Ransom himself. For the poet, in a fierce act of purgation, force-slimmed his poems to 68 pages. Selected with a vengeance. Presented here now is the first-ever complete edition of the poems of John Crowe Ransom, restoring to the world in the name not of mercy but of justice a great many poems that he himself had once (and quite rightly) judged perfectly worthy of publication, poems that, joining now his select poems, will enjoy a renaissance.

Ben Mazerwas born in New York City in 1964, and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts. His poems have been widely published in international literary periodicals, includingVerse,Stand,Leviathan Quarterly,Harvard Magazine,Jacket Magazine,Fulcrum,Pequod,The BostonPhoenix,ThumbscrewandAgenda. He is a contributing editor toFulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. His first collection of poems,White Cities, was published by Barbara Matteau Editions in 1995. His most recent collections of poems arePoems(The Pen & Anvil Press) andJanuary 2008(Dark Sky Books), both published in April 2010. His edition of Ransom's poems was effected at the Editorial Institute, Boston University.

TheCollected Poems of John Crowe Ransomwill be published in cooperation withAlfred A. Knopf, Inc. / Knopf Doubleday Publishing and byCO-OP-PRODUCTION.

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SOURCE Un-Gyve Press