Kenyon College

Kenyon College is a private liberal arts college founded in Gambier, Ohio in 1824, by Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase. Originally an all-male institution, Kenyon became co-educational in 1969. Kenyon remains loosely affliated with the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Kenyon College is a member of the Five Colleges of Ohio, Great Lakes Colleges Association, and the Association of Episcopal Colleges.

Academics

Kenyon's English Department is perhaps the best known among the college's academic departments. The English department first gained recognition with the arrival of the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom in 1937 as Professor of Poetry and first editor of The Kenyon Review, a literary journal. Perhaps the department's greatest influence on American literature derives from the role that it played in the development of a theory of literary study known as "the New Criticism." At a time when many scholars and teachers focused on the historical backgrounds of a literary text or probed authors' biographies for psychological clues, Ransom and his contemporaries argued for a method of literary analysis which took literature to be the most significant way humanity has ever devised for exploring reality, and which took texts themselves with corresponding seriousness, reading them closely and interpreting them intensively. Besides John Crowe Ransom, notable English faculty have included Jacques Barzun, Elizabeth Bishop, Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, Alfred Kazin, Robert Lowell, Arthur Mizener, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Yvor Winters, and more recently, John Kinsella and James Wood. Former English students at Kenyon include poets Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Robert Mezey, James Wright, and Anthony Hecht, biographer and poet Daniel Mark Epstein, playwright Wendy MacLeod, and authors Peter Taylor, Fred Waitzkin, P. F. Kluge, James Wright, William Gass, Laura Hillenbrand, and E. L. Doctorow.

Related Topics:
John Crowe Ransom - Kenyon Review - New Criticism - Jacques Barzun - Elizabeth Bishop - Eric Bentley - Cleanth Brooks - William Empson - Alfred Kazin - Robert Lowell - Arthur Mizener - Allen Tate - Robert Penn Warren - Yvor Winters - John Kinsella - James Wood - Randall Jarrell - Robert Mezey - Anthony Hecht - Daniel Mark Epstein - Wendy MacLeod - Peter Taylor - Fred Waitzkin - P. F. Kluge - James Wright - William Gass - Laura Hillenbrand - E. L. Doctorow

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