Ransom was eager to get back to scholarship and completed a B.A. at Vanderbilt, again graduating valedictorian with membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He was selected Rhodes scholar in 1910 after a year as principal in Lewisburg, and he earned an M.A. with honors in the classics from Christ Church College, Oxford, before traveling Europe and the British Isles. After a year of teaching Latin in Lakeville, Connecticut, he returned to Vanderbilt in 1914 to teach English literature, numbering among his pupils Cleanth Brooks, Donald Davidson, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren.
Before serving as first lieutenant in the field artillery in France during World War I, Ransom had already begun submitting poems to Contemporary Verse and Independent. With the help of essayist Christopher Morley and poet Robert Frost, he published Poems About God (1919) in England before returning to the United States. About the time that his conservative discussion group, the Fugitives, was meeting to debate the future of Southern literature, he married Robb Reavill and began a family of three — daughters Helen and Reavill and son John James. Ransom developed into a skilled, restrained wordsmith and a master of clarity who admired dense texts enhanced by precise diction and technical skill.
