Poet John Crowe Ransom accepted the challenge of correlating empirical fact with the shadowy world of feeling. Grouped with Robert Penn Warren, Merrill Moore, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson as one of the original Fugitive Agrarians, an influential circle of Southern scholars, critics, and poets, he was the most distinguished critic and editor of his age. His verse, composed during a complex period of phenomenal scientific and technological advancement, registered a modern paradox — the intellectual delight in progress set against the spirit's ambivalence, a tortuous state that the poet described as a "[walk] in hell." His literary fervor precipitated a rebirth of Southern literature and resultant awards and honors to the era's foremost proponent of modern verse.
Ransom, a native of Tennessee and the third of four children, was born in Pulaski on April 30, 1888, to Sara Ella Crowe and the Reverend John James Ransom, a Methodist minister. He studied at home with his father during his childhood, when the family moved among four parishes. In 1899, he profited at a Nashville boys' academy from the teachings of its principal, Angus Gordon Bowen. Ransom was tops in his high school class, completed two years at Vanderbilt University, then left to teach middle grades in Taylorsville, Mississippi, and Latin and Greek at Haynes-McLean School in Lewisburg, Tennessee.
