Roger Prim, Gentleman: Gender, Pragmatism, and the Strange Career of John Crowe Ransom

Abstract

John Crowe Ransom’s early and mid-career writings on gender as well as the nature of the aesthetic object are both intimated related and more complicated than critics previously have acknowledged. Ransom’s early poetry, which often depicts strained and anxiety-ridden relationships between men and women, anticipates the strangely gendered rhetoric the critic later employs to engage with the pragmatic aesthetics of John Dewey. Illuminating Ransom’s longstanding intellectual engagement with the century’s pre-eminent social scientist as well as the more egalitarian aspects of the poet’s reflections on the roles of women in modern society, this essay corrects recent truisms concerning the New Critics while revealing the extent to which Ransom’s work contains the seeds of its own undoing by subsequent generations of critics.