The Kenyon Review

The Kenyon Review is a quarterly American literary magazine, which is located at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Under the editorship of John Crowe Ransom in the years 1939-1959 it was one of the leading literary magazines of the United States and was at that time one of the main spokesmen of the New Criticism, a formalistic oriented literary theory school. Today appear less theoretical texts rather than those of contemporary literature, especially poetry -.

History

1937 Gordon Keith Chalmers was elected president of the hitherto rather insignificant province Colleges in Gambier; immediately he sat down, on the advice of his wife Roberta Teale Swartz the establishment of a college 's literary magazine to the target. In the same year he managed to recruit a professor of poetry through the mediation of Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom. Ransom had distinguished himself in his years at Vanderbilt University as one of the leading literary critic of the country and wanted to turn back to that time to literature, after the co-sponsored by him agrarian- conservative movement of the Southern Agrarians had virtually dissolved. Ransom followed in 1938 two of his most promising students - the young poet Randall Jarell and Robert Lowell - to Gambier. Soon the establishment of a college 's literary magazine was decided. The first issue of the Kenyon Review was published in the winter of 1939; as publisher changed its name Ransom, as his deputy Philip Blair Rice. In the coming years the sheet to one of the most important publications of the New Criticism was, so here published Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks some of their most important essays.